Andy Tran
Child Advocacy
What is the source of your fire for child advocacy? It may be helpful to close your eyes and imagine the image, story, news, or other source that first sparked your interest in child advocacy.​
What is the goal for your advocacy work? Is it something you can achieve in the short term, or is it a long-term goal?
What is the context for your advocacy work -- the local, regional (state), national, or international level?
What is the context for your advocacy work -- the local, regional (state), national, or international level?
My spark for child advocacy comes from news. Every time I hear about child abuse, child neglect, child abduction, child pornography, child trafficking, and or anything that is negatively harmful to a child, it brings my blood to a boil. When I hear about children dying, for example from cancer, I feel like we need to do more. Like donating to St. Jude or some charitable organization that will help or fight to alleviate the children's pain and suffering.
My ultimate long-term goal for advocating is to end all suffering inflicting to children. I know that this is a wishful thought, but we must try. The short-term goal is to get the words out to our local community through word of mouth, blogging, create fun events to raise awareness, find partners and volunteers to bounce ideas and help with the initiatives. The community needs to know that child neglect and abuse is happening everywhere. Although it is not happening in our backyard, it is very surreal elsewhere especially in low-income neighborhoods and in many third world countries. We are all citizen of the earth and all people are interconnected in some ways. If we want our children to grow up in a fair, justice, equitable, healthy, and beautiful world, we need to care about all children and not just our own.
At the early stage of the advocacy work, I would start at the local level and work my way up to regional (state), national, and to international. Vietnam is the country that I was born in. I hear that there are a lot of orphans in Vietnam, so one day I hope to help these children have a place to call home and provide them with proper care and education so they can have a good future.
I think funding and finding the gatekeeper to a decision maker will be challenging for my advocacy work. Finding philanthropist to fund my cause and believe in me will be another challenge. What I can control is my persistent and never accept a “no” for a “no”. The one thing that I think is most damaging to an advocacy is oneself ego, and face people who do not share the same ideas and cause. I will have this in mind to not to take anything personally and keep pushing forward for the children.
How will you persist in efforts towards your goal, despite inevitable challenges? What inspiration will keep you going?
Knowing that if I keep at it someone will hear me and if one person hears me, eventually more and more people will hear the message too. An image of a child suffering will inspire me to keep going. I would like to personally visit families with young children in low-income neighborhoods, and one day visit Vietnam to meet the needy children living in the streets on their own.
Do you prefer working alone or as part of a team? Where can you find others to collaborate on your advocacy goal?
I prefer to work with others with the same goals and visions, only by working together can we make more impactful changes. I would start with the internet where there are no boundaries, and I can reach vast amount of people who are like myself, such as joining groups on Facebook, twitter, Reddit etc.
What are your methods for self-care to avoid burnout?
My method for self-care and stress relieve for burnout has always been walking. Walking allows me to step away from the current stressful situation to regroup my thoughts and emotion.
Affordable High-Quality Childcare for All!
Statement of problem
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- Lack of high-quality childcare
- Too expensive
- Lack of qualified teachers
Description of two or more proposed solutions
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- Subsidies for new providers
- More relaxed city and state ordinance for buildings to be used as centers
- Incentives for builders to build childcare centers
- Educate the public communities regarding the importance of early childhood education and the roles for early childcare professionals in the society
Likely outcomes if the proposed solutions are or are not implemented
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Solutions Implemented:
- Funding
- More quality childcare spots available
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Discussion of the need for change
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- Wait lists are too long for high-quality childcare
- Zoning laws prevent buildings to be used as childcare centers
- Too expensive for new providers to enter the childcare industry
List of organizations and key individuals in support of these solutions
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- High net worth individual with like-minded for childcare
- 4Cs in San Mateo, California
- National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
- National Child Care Association
- National Head Start Association
- ChildCare Aware of America
Solutions Not Implemented:
- No additional quality childcare
- More children falling through the social crack and incurring social welfare
- More people living in poverty
- Increase in crimes
- Larger population with physical and mental problems
- Lower higher-education graduates
When our society moves backwards!
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According to Center on the Developing Child (2009), more than 1 million neural connections are created per second in the first five years of a child’s life. We know that our brain is 95% developed by age 5, so by investing in early childhood, we can expect 7 – 10 percent in annual return or $16 for every $1 (Rutenbeck et al., 2015). Despite knowing this, we are not investing enough effort and resources in early childhood here in the United States. Despite U.S. being known as the largest economy in the world, the well-being of our children is ranked 26 out of 29 among developed nations (Herbes-Sommers et al., 2015). Today, the childcare industry is facing problems such as lack of affordable high-quality childcare, lack of qualified teachers, and entry barriers in the industry.
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As important as early childhood education is, not everyone has access to affordable preschool and childcare in America. According to Sklar (2020), “fifty-one percent of Americans live in an area with little or no licensed childcare, and for families who qualify for childcare subsidies, access is even scarcer” (p. 5). After the pandemic, childcare centers shut down and have not reopened and few centers are opened for 12 hours. Fortune magazine recently reported that childcare costs have gone through the roof, a cost increase of 41 percent for center based childcare providers across the United States, and parents are spending an average of $14,117 per child or 20 percent of their household income (Sherman, 2022). Based on these data, the childcare industry is shrinking in a time where we need it to increase in quality and capacity to maintain and improve an equitable and sustainable future society.
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Furthermore, “Early childhood educators with a bachelor’s or master’s in early childhood education makes up to $6 less per hour than similarly educated peers in other industries and most early childhood educators are females, with forty percent colored” (Sklar, 2020, p. 5). Due to the low compensation and professional standards in the childcare industry, it is hard for childcare providers to find qualified staff. In addition, the turnover rate is forty percent in this industry which risk the care and well-being of little children (Sklar, 2020, p. 5). It takes time for children to bond with their caregivers and constant changes of caregivers can substantially affect children’s well-being negatively. The industry really needs a new makeover to attract and retain skilled work force to serve young families in America.
As a family in-home childcare provider since 2014 in the Silicon Valley San Francisco Bay Area, I have always wanted to expand into a center to serve more children in my local community. I still have not been successful in realizing my dream because there are too many barriers to entry, such as, no facility available for rent, strict building zoning code which makes it extremely difficult or impossible to convert other buildings into a childcare center, and the cost to buy a new facility or business is unaffordable to most in-home childcare providers. In 2020, Redwood City rolled out a new zoning code, California Article 39 Child Care Facilities, which permits in-home family daycare to convert into a center (Redwood City, 2020). I was thrilled about the prospect to convert my house to a center which on the surface sound like a more viable option since buying a business and renting cost around $2 million and buying a preschool with around 50 kids will cost me probably over $5 million. After working with an architecture to increase my house capacity from 12 to 60 children and was approved by the Planning Department. Next, The Fire Department reviewed and told us we needed to upgrade our water pressure which means a bigger pipe underground and that will cost us $500,000 or more. Also, the fire truck must have a clear path and parking on my property in case of fire, which wiped off the required employee parking spaces we initially had reserved accordingly to childcare licensing rules. Essentially, the fire marshal told us it is impossible to convert our property which is over 11,000 square feet property. Despite the effort the State of California made to help ease childcare providers’ cost of expansion, it did not solve the problem because of other regulations and ordinances not addressed at the lower level. I asked Apollo Rojas, currently the supervisor at City of Redwood City planning department, at the beginning of 2022 to see if any in-home childcare providers had successfully converted their homes and his answer was “no.”
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America is going backwards with the current problems that we are encountering. The wait lists for high-quality childcare are too long due to shortages in spaces available, scarcity of qualified early childhood teachers, zoning laws prevent buildings to be used as childcare centers, and the high expense for new providers to enter the childcare industry. What needs to be changed for America to go forward? We need to educate the public communities regarding the importance of early childhood education, the roles for early childcare professionals in the society and how it will benefit the whole society in the future. We can accomplish this by collaborating with colleges and employers, provide funding and subsidies to childcare providers that are looking to improve and expand their program, work with providers to create a more relaxed city and state ordinance for buildings to be used as centers and provide incentives for builders to build childcare centers.
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4Cs – San Mateo County
Provides childcare resources and training to parents and educators
Sobrato Center for Nonprofits - Redwood Shores
330 Twin Dolphin Drive, Suite 119
Redwood City, CA 94065
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National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
Promotes high-quality early learning for all young children from birth to eight.
1401 H Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202-232-8777
Toll-free: 800-424-2460
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National Child Care Association
Advocate and provide resources to licensed child care providers to advance early childhood education.
P.O. Box 2948, Merrifield, VA
Toll Free: 877-537-NCCA (6222)
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National Head Start Association
Set standards, provide training and support for educators to encourage high quality-child care and education development.
P.O. Box 268
Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Tel: (916) 444-7760
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ChildCare Aware of America
Nations advocate for high-quality affordable child care.
Call: (703) 341-4100, Monday-Friday 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. EDT
Email: learnmore@usa.childcareaware.org
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Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Provide a platform to connect philanthropists to non-for-profit organizations that support needy and distressed areas.
2440 W El Camino Real #300
Mountain View, CA 94040
Email: info@siliconvalleycf.org
For example, Pathway to Earn and Learn (PAYA) is a youth internship program counseling students as early as in high school. The program offers high schoolers earn-while-you-learn model, a structured and work-based learning (Sklar, 2020, p. 6). This can be a solution to prevent low-income family teenagers to drop out of school early and continue higher education. The paid program extends to college and is a collaboration between postsecondary education providers and employers, and later leads to full-time employment for college graduates (Sklar, 2020, p. 7). This pathway not only benefits students but also employers because they get to train employees early on who later will not only possess early childhood education but also the experience needed to provide high quality care for young children. West Virginia’s Child Development Specialist college apprenticeship program launched in 1989 and later developed in 20 other states, has proven to be effective strategies for removing barriers to credentials and starting educators’ path to earn a degree (Sklar, 2020, p. 8). Castlemont high school ran a pilot youth program where 70 percent were Latinx and 25 percent black and 87.6 percent of the students qualified for free or reduced meals (Sklar, 2020, p. 8). Apprenticeship program allows high school students to gain valuable hands-on experience, dual credit college coursework with structure, opportunity for full-time work in the future, and dept-free head start (Sklar, 2020, p. 8). Program such as this hits two birds with one stone because it helps closing the gap of the lack of workforce in the childcare industry but also potentially improve the financial difficulty for low-income families. For the early childhood professional carrier pathway to be attractive, early childhood teachers must be respected in the community and get higher paid equally with elementary teachers. We need a whole village to raise a child so collaborating with micro, mezzo, and macro level organizations and key individuals should not be overlooked. Here are a few organizations that could become our partner that either work or support early childhood education and development.
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In addition to the organizations above, seeking out like-minded philanthropist in supporting childcare providers with expansion and improving their programs could help secure much more funding for our cause. Our goal is to persuade these entities to support us on the initiative to advocate funding for childcare providers expansion throughout United States. At the local level, we will have the city work with the fire department to resolve barriers in building code and zoning directly with childcare providers and childcare licensing and offer building contractors a federal or state credit when they incorporate a childcare facility in their building project.
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Initiatives, subsidies, and funding to assist childcare providers develop and create more quality childcare spots will help our society reduce dollars spent in special education, welfare, and crime costs in the future. We do not want children to be exposed to negative and improper care early childhood. The reason is because children who experience 6 -7 significant adverse experiences in early childhood have 90-100% chance of developing delays (Center on the Developing Child, 2009). For instance Granite District in Salt Lake City, many families lived in extreme poverty, and in 2006, they decided to implement a program like the Perry school, a high-quality preschool program (Rutenbeck, 2015). Here 11 students out of 238 students that initially were considered at risk to transfer to special education, received high-quality early childhood education, did equally well compares to regular students (Rutenbeck, 2015). This proves how effective high-quality preschool programs can help prevent increase in special education for children who likely will depend on social welfare in the future. Positive effects of high-quality childcare found children who attended high-quality early childhood program had higher reading and math scores and fewer discipline referrals (Cited in Richards, 2022, p. 4). When Utah lacked high-quality childcare program, it was reported that they faced a spiral upward social cost due to increase in children with developmental delays (Rutenbeck, 2015). Failing to implement solutions above will result in no additional quality childcare, more children falling through the social crack and incurring social welfare, increased people living in poverty, higher crime rate, a larger population with physical and mental problems, and a decrease of higher-education graduates.
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To conclude, the first five years of a child life is the most important time because the brains’ neural connections is formed. These connections build up the brain architecture and create the foundation for all later learning, behavior, cognitive and physical health. Healthy educated adults become contributor and create wealth for the society. It is easy to postpone problems that we do not see at the present or because it is not behind our backyard. Still! Problems do not go away on its own and time does not stop ticking. Our action today will determine the outcome of our future and the children are our future.
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References:
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Center on the Developing Child (2009). Five Numbers to Remember About Early Childhood Development (Brief). Center on the developing Child Harvard University. Http://www.developingchild.harvard.edu.
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Herbes-Sommers, C., California Newsreel, & Vital Pictures (Producers), & Herbes-Sommers, C. (Director). (2015). The raising of America. [Video/DVD] California Newsreel. https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/the-raising-of-america
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Redwood City (2020). Article 39 – Child Care Facilities. California – Zoning code. https://library.municode.com/ca/redwood_city/codes/zoning_code?nodeId=ART39CHCAFA
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Richards, C. G. (2022). Early childhood directors’ perspectives regarding barriers to childcare quality improvement. Walden University. file:///Users/andytran/Dropbox%20(Little%20Builders)/Masters%20ECE/EDUC%20586/article.pdf.
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Rutenbeck, J., California Newsreel, & Vital Pictures (Producers), & Rutenbeck, J. (Director). (2015). Are we crazy about our kids?: The cost/benefit equation. [Video/DVD]
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Sherman, R. (2022, August 11). The childcare conundrum. Nurse Leader. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mnl.2022.07.00
Sklar, Cara (2020, September 24). Youth apprenticeship in early childhood education. New America. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED609113.pdf.
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Wright, A. C., & Jaffe, K. J. (2013). Six steps to successful child advocacy: Changing the world for children. SAGE Publications.
Decision Maker 2: Mrs. Sarah Obi is the head of the Educational department. While she has been in the national government bureaucracy for a long time, she has just transferred over from another department and is still learning about her new role in this new department. She has met with staff under her direction to learn about her jobs in order to better understand her own. The reason for her appointment was that the previous head of the Education department had been perceived as incompetent, and Mrs. Obi is finding that ineptitude in the department is widespread. She is middle-aged and married with pictures of her children prominently displayed in her office. Religion is also important to her, and devotional images are displayed in her office.
What type of research would you have done about the decision maker prior to your meeting? Are there other things not included in the descriptions that you would like to have known?
How specifically would you use the background information to interact with the decision maker in your meeting?
Choose 1 of the Following Gatekeepers Below:
Gatekeeper 1: Martha Gonzalez is the administrative assistant to a very powerful elected official (state governor or equivalent). She has been in the position for 25 years. Her words and actions suggest that she feels that she has complete control over the decision maker. If people indicate that they have tried to access the decision maker directly, without going through her, she gets upset. When people contact her to arrange a meeting with the decision maker, she is often impatient and curt. Listening to opera music and reading, particularly mystery novels, are her passions.
What type of research would you have done about the gatekeeper prior to your meeting? Are there other things not included in the descriptions that you would like to have known?.
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How specifically would you use the background information to interact with the gatekeeper in your meeting?
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Based on your chosen Decision Maker and Gatekeeper, what other types of people would you choose to bring to your meeting? Be very specific.
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How would these people fit with your issue and building connections with the decision maker or gatekeeper? Be specific in naming who these persons are and the clear role they would play.
I choose decision maker 2 since she is a woman with children that she cares dearly about. She likely will have a connection to my childcare issue at heart and relate to the inequity that female labor force is often experiencing since early childhood is often dominated by woman with lower pay. I will research about causes that she supports so far and what she currently cares about so I can leverage the information to conjoin them with my early childhood education and care solutions. I would like to learn more about her children because they will give me some hints about what she thinks is important in raising children.
I will ask her about her children. How are they doing in school and outside of school and their accomplishments? I will also ask her how she experienced her children’s preschool and daycare. I will then give her praises on her choices and complement the program her children attended if it sounded like a high-quality program. From there I can present how other family in U.S. do not have access to the same program which leads to children not growing up to become socially responsible adults that can contribute to our society and instead cost the government social welfare support dollars. If the childcare program her children attended were not good, then I will just go straight to the problems in the childcare industry and how we can resolve them.
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I would research what type of legislations she has pushed through to the decision marker in the 25 years she has been there. In addition, I would like to know if she is married, have kids, and grand kids? How many brothers and sisters she has and how many nieces and nephews she has? If any of her sisters and brothers are also facing a childcare crisis? Where they all live, learn about their family and culture values, and more specifically, their values around young children and their belief about the childcare issue in U.S. It is important to confirm whether Martha is from Mexico, and research if she still has family in Mexico because educating children are very important in the Mexican culture and teachers are respected and often are trusted for the task. I like to know if she has nieces and nephews that faced early childcare hardship. If they had a hard time getting into a high-quality childcare?
I would not jump right into the point with Martha. Instead, I would casually interact with her and get to know her first and develop a relationship with her. First, we can talk about opera music and mystery novels. Invite her to a few lunch meetings or bring her lunch and novels and not mention a word about the advocacy issue. Just as two friends having a causal lunch, discussing how our day is like, talking about her passion and mine, and seeking out what we have in common. Slowly I would introduce the advocacy issue through discussing about her family, more specifically her children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, and try to learn everything I can about the information surrounding childcare that her family are facing or had faced. She possibly also has extended family that works in childcare with low wages that she might want to help. From there I would introduce her to my advocacy issues.
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I would bring the following individuals below because these are people who either fight towards an equitable society, or are directly affected by my issue.
Mauricio Palma, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, director of initiatives and special projects.
Alejandra Martinez, preschool teacher at Little Builders.
Stacy Quezada, a family daycare provider in Redwood City who was forced out of the area.
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I used to take an early childhood education class with Mauricio Palma, who works full-time as a director of initiatives and special projects at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. During his class, he revealed his passion for assisting needy family in Silicon Valley and work towards an equitable society in U. S. I will also bring with me teacher Alejandra who just recently came from Mexico to U.S. 2 years ago, whom I pay $26 dollars today and promised a long-term career advancement as long as I can stay afloat and able to expand my business in the area. Stacey is a friend in the daycare providers who rented for years to run her family daycare business in Redwood City for many years. She was forced out of the area as rent continued to increase and she was facing to many obstacles. Mauricio can help me show how the problems in low-income families and their children are real. Teacher Alejandra could share her experience in working for me and how my program helps the children develop cognitively and physically well. Stacey and I will then present our difficulties and barriers in expanding our programs in which other childcare providers in the area also are encountering.
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