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In 2020, voters in California’s Alameda County made a remarkable decision. Rather than accept generations of underinvestment in young children, they chose to build something families had never truly had: an early childhood system designed to work.

Parents, early educators, childcare providers, labor leaders, business leaders, advocates and community organizations came together around a shared belief: Our youngest children deserved better than a fragmented system that asked families to shoulder impossible burdens while treating early childhood as an afterthought instead of the essential public infrastructure it has always been.

Together, they built , also known as the Children’s Health & Child Care Initiative for Alameda County. It’s a community-led, voter-approved half-cent sales tax dedicated to early care and education expected to generate $150 million annually. Measure C wasn’t created simply to fund more childcare. It was created to build the early childhood infrastructure that allows families to work, children to thrive, providers to succeed and communities to prosper.

In its first year of implementation, Measure C more than $135 million across Alameda County, reaching nearly 20,000 children, supporting more than 6,400 educators and caregivers, improving early learning facilities buildings and programming, helping childcare providers keep their doors open, connecting more families with the care they need, and building a stronger, more connected early childhood system.

Those investments matter because the need has always been profound. In Alameda County, which lies across the bay from San Francisco, who qualify for subsidized childcare are not receiving it. Nearly half of families live in what researchers call a licensed childcare desert, and two out of every three children are not fully prepared for kindergarten.

These aren’t individual failures. They are the predictable outcome of decades of underinvestment in one of the most important public systems we have.

Decades of have shown that a child’s earliest years shape lifelong health, educational success and economic opportunity. Yet historically, we have invested far less in those years than the evidence, and our families, have demanded.

I grew up between working-class New Hampshire and San Francisco’s Mission District, shaped by both the strength and the fragility of public systems. That’s the lens I’ve carried through nearly 30 years in public service, social services, economic development, federal regulatory work and now as CEO of First 5 Alameda County, the agency responsible for implementing Measure C. I’ve learned the difference between policies that make a splash and systems that actually change lives.

Funding matters. Implementation determines whether funding changes lives.

Public dollars become real opportunities for families only when communities have the capacity to put those investments to work. That means building partnerships, strong fiscal stewardship, workforce development, facilities, transparent accountability, modern data systems and public institutions capable of responding to what families actually need.

Because what families need is often more nuanced than the legislation, the art of interpretation for implementation is critical. In Alameda County, more than searching for childcare are looking for providers who speak a language other than English. 

More than one-quarter of working parents need care outside traditional business hours. Families raising children with disabilities continue to face significant barriers finding inclusive programs. These aren’t exceptions, they’re everyday realities that should shape how public systems are designed.

Responding effectively to those realities requires more than funding announcements or good intentions. It requires public institutions willing to partner with communities, listen to families, invest strategically and continually improve operations and program design based on lived experience.

This kind of stewardship rarely attracts headlines. It happens in community centers, church halls, classrooms, neighborhood meetings and around kitchen tables. It’s technical, collaborative and often invisible. Yet it’s the work that determines whether public investment succeeds or stalls.

Alameda County isn’t alone. Across the country, communities are reaching the same conclusion: Early childhood isn’t private family responsibility. It is essential public infrastructure.

That’s the same shift happening elsewhere. New Mexico has built one of the most ambitious early childhood systems in the country through sustained public investment. New York City has made universal childcare central to its economic future. San Francisco keeps expanding what it invests locally to close gaps in access. Different paths, same realization: Where a lack of national childcare policy and funding has left a hole, communities are stepping up to build the system themselves.

No single county can do that alone. But a system built well and built to be shared becomes something bigger than the place that built it. What we’re working toward isn’t just about helping the kids down the block. It’s an example to inform national policy and practice, to set a regulatory framework and funding to help the kids down the block — and the kids growing up on the Eastern Seaboard, too.

Measure C began as a promise to the children in our own neighborhoods. The question now isn’t whether that kind of promise can work, Alameda County is proof that it does. It’s how we can use local examples to demonstrate we can achieve national promise to all families and children, making the local implementation that much easier to achieve lasting results for kids and families.

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