Anchorage officials are preparing to roll out funding dedicated to improving the child care sector in a city where it’s challenging to find affordable care. The move comes two years after Anchorage residents voted to dedicate the roughly $5 to $6 million the city receives annually in marijuana taxes to funding child care initiatives.
Former Acting Mayor and Assembly member Austin Quinn-Davidson has been working as a contractor with the city to help determine how to allocate the marijuana tax funding. She’s also currently the interim executive director for the Anchorage Child Care and Early Education Fund Board. She said the city has seen a dwindling supply of child care providers in recent years.
“There's many pieces of the puzzle to solve,” Quinn-Davidson said. “Ensuring that there's sufficient spots for people who need them is important, and then it's also important to look at cost. So the 2025 budget looks at both and addresses both.”
The funding will be divided into three different avenues. The first is $1.25 million to specifically cover child care costs for people working in the sector. Desiré Shepler is president and CEO of Alaska Family Services, which will be in charge of distributing the funds. Shepler said many child care workers are also parents, and supporting their child care costs will help keep the workforce stable for all parents.
“A part of keeping the sector alive is having folks who can afford to work there, and being able to afford their child care is a big piece of that for many parents,” Shepler said.
Quinn-Davidson said the approach is modeled after a Kentucky program that provides free child care to child care sector employees. That state saw an increase of more than 100% in the number of families receiving child care assistance in just one year.
While Quinn-Davidson said she understands concerns that the subsidies only target a specific part of the city’s population, she thinks supporting the child care industry — where she says the average worker makes under $30,000 annually — will pay wider dividends.
“It benefits the broader community, because more families can access child care,” Quinn-Davidson said. “And it benefits the economy, because you have more families working, because they have care available.”
The state of Alaska has a broader existing child care subsidy program that is based on income. Shepler said the funding for child care workers to cover their own care needs will not be income-dependent, and she hopes to start rolling out that funding by the end of summer.
A second chunk of the marijuana taxes, about $2 million, will go to child care providers, both in-home and centers, to fund larger projects. Quinn-Davidson said, ideally, some of those projects would be upgrades to existing programs.
“We know that because people, entities are struggling to pay their workers and they don't want to raise rates on families, things like playground equipment, you know, any sort of expansion, those are the first things to go, because people don't have the funds to do that,” she said. “And so we wanted to provide a space for folks to do small to large capital upgrades.”
She said another goal is to get providers to use the funding for new, innovative approaches to deliver better child care.
“We want to hear from folks out there saying, ‘This is how I could do it. If I had a one time influx of cash, I could create this way to provide services in a better way, or in a way that's more affordable,’ or to increase access to high quality early education services,” Quinn-Davidson said.
Quinn-Davidson said the deadline for providers to apply for that funding is Thursday, May 15.
She said the rest of the money is set to go toward administrative costs and for stimulus funding to support existing centers that are on the brink of closing.
