New York’s Place-Based Policy Coalition Is Turning Local Wins Into Statewide Childcare Policy
For thousands of families across New York, finding childcare means driving long distances, sitting on waitlists for months or leaving the workforce altogether. Behind every one of those stories is a caregiver stretched thin, a parent choosing between a paycheck and peace of mind, and a child who deserves a strong start no matter their zip code.
The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet (PCC) in Poughkeepsie, New York, and ROC the Future Alliance in Rochester, New York, have spent years working to advance outcomes for kids in their communities. As members of the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network, both organizations have established strong, cross-sector partnerships within their cities and counties with the goal of increasing intergenerational socioeconomic mobility.
And while their place-based, cradle-to-career work is making significant positive impacts in their cities, Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet and ROC the Future Alliance are proving that statewide collaboration is crucial for creating the policy conditions in which all children can thrive.
In August 2026, StriveTogether awarded the New York State Place-Based Policy Coalition, of which PCC and ROC the Future Alliance are founding members, a $500,000 grant to help the Coalition advance state policy proposals that improve outcomes for youth and advance socioeconomic mobility.
With this funding, the Place-Based Policy Coalition plans to build on the momentum started by Governor Kathy Hochul’s historic $4.5 billion suite of investments in early childhood, including the selection of Dutchess and Monroe counties, home of PCC and ROC the Future, as pilot communities for income-blind, low-cost childcare. The statewide Coalition will focus on putting the pilot dollars awarded to Dutchess and Monroe counties to work, creating more access to quality childcare in neighborhoods where seats are not currently available and building toward a thriving wage for the early childhood education workforce.
From Local Roots to Statewide Wins
From the beginning, the Coalition recognized the important of early childhood education as the foundation for a child’s learning, social development and future success.
ROC the Future Alliance in Rochester and the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet in Poughkeepsie are evidence of what can happen when years of local collaborative organizing are reinforced with sizable state investment.
Both organizations have joined forces with parents, advocates and systems leaders to improve child outcomes across New York State. With their respective partners, they have launched initiatives, supported coalitions and tapped into deep community expertise with the goal of expanding childcare access and quality in their communities.
The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet was an early member of the countywide Early Learning and Child Care Coalition (ELCCC), organized by the Dutchess County Workforce Investment Board. The ELCCC brings together leadership from the county Department of Community and Family Services, childcare providers, nonprofits, local, state and federal elected officials, workforce leaders and other engaged community members around a bold goal to create a universal care system for Dutchess County within 10 years.
In Rochester, ROC the Future Alliance has come together with a large coalition of like-minded organizations and individuals to address poverty and inequality through RMAPI, which works to dismantle oppressive structural systems and expand upward mobility for all. RMAPI advocates for universal childcare as a key to breaking the cycle of poverty and enabling socioeconomic mobility.
Years of coalition building and groundwork have paid off. In January 2026, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul announced that Dutchess, Monroe and Broome counties had been selected as First Three pilot communities.
Through this program, each county will receive $22 million in state funding annually for three years to create 1,000 low-cost, full-day, year-round pilot seats for children ages zero to three, regardless of family income.
The pilot is part of Governor Hochul’s historic $4.5 billion suite of investments in early childhood, which also includes additional funding for the Child Care Assistance Program, funding to truly universalize pre-K throughout the state and funding to launch 2-Care in New York City.
How the State Coalition Took Shape
Behind this win is years of preparation. The state’s investment is landing in communities that had already built the infrastructure to use it well, before the pilot was ever announced.
ROC the Future Alliance and the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet first connected at a StriveTogether policy summit in 2024, where Jill Gomez, the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet’s executive director, met Brian Lewis, the executive director of ROC the Future Alliance.
Talking through their work, the two realized they were tackling the same challenges in different cities, and that a shared coalition with a state policy agenda could take that work further, faster than either organization could alone.
Each organization was founded with a sense of urgency, responding to specific community and systems-level needs. The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet coordinates the city’s cradle-to-career work through a Leadership Council co-chaired by the mayor of Poughkeepsie and the superintendent of schools, working toward a shared vision of 5,000 youth on pathways to economic mobility by 2033.
ROC the Future Alliance organizes its work around parent engagement, youth leadership and outcome teams focused on school readiness and high school graduation, with a goal of 80% kindergarten readiness for Black and Brown children by 2030.
Both organizations are reinforced by the breadth, depth and power of their aligned local networks. ROC the Future Alliance counts The Children’s Agenda and the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative (RMAPI) among its longtime partners in Rochester, and both organizations point to Ampact as a partner that has helped connect high-dosage tutoring work between Rochester and Poughkeepsie.
Their shared structures and emphasis on leveraging local partnerships inspired PCC and ROC the Future Alliance to found the New York State Place-Based Policy Coalition in 2025.
The Coalition’s membership also extends to South Bronx Rising Together, United for Brownsville, Say Yes Buffalo and the Wayne County Community Schools Partnership, the latter three also part of the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network.
Together, these partners align community-focused advocacy efforts from across the state’s diverse regions that seek to create pathways for children based on measurable outcomes in health, safety and education from prenatal services through career success.
While each organization champions place-based work in its own region, the Coalition recognizes that parents and young people all around the state were already leading efforts to change local systems long before anyone in the group did formal policy work.
Brian describes the coalition as organic, born out of community and systems-level needs that allowed each organization to test small changes locally and identify real proof points that move outcomes.
“I think that’s what sets us apart,” he has said, “our local organizations were born out of community and systems-levels need. Then, we realized quickly that by joining forces, we could amplify impact and reinforce our efforts at scale, statewide.”
That need also shows up plainly in the words of the people doing the work. One early childhood provider in Dutchess County, speaking anonymously in a focus group, said she could make more money working at a fast food restaurant than she makes caring for children, a comparison that captures exactly the kind of pressure the Coalition was built to address.
Advancing cradle-to-career policy efforts
The Governor’s investment is designed to move universal childcare forward in Dutchess and Monroe counties. Alongside that work, the Place-Based Policy Coalition’s own dedicated funding is opening up something bigger, the chance to expand and accelerate advocacy efforts within New York State and contribute to the advancement of cradle-to-career policy efforts in other states and at the federal level.
Building on momentum from the First Three pilot, these advocacy efforts will include a significant focus on early childhood. The Coalition’s policy platform includes a recommendation to advance universal childcare to relieve the childcare cost burden for New York families and ensure equitable access to early childhood education.
Increasing the percentage of children with access to licensed care and establishing a strong start for early childhood literacy and numeracy foundations will help prepare children across the state for kindergarten. Simultaneously, free- or low-cost universal childcare would allow more families to cover other essential expenses and free up more parents and caregivers to participate in the workforce.
Importantly, this priority is accompanied by another, to strengthen statewide teacher and early education pipelines by diversifying and stabilizing the workforce. Specifically, the Coalition recommends that the state increase teacher pay, particularly in high-need districts, and expand funding for teacher residency programs and grow-your-own initiatives.
National research shows why this matters for children and the workforce. In childcare centers paying less than $10 an hour, nearly a quarter of staff leave within a year, compared with about 7.5% in centers paying $25 an hour or more. That turnover carries real consequences, a 2024 study of Head Start classrooms found that children who experienced teacher turnover made slower gains in language development, one of the earliest building blocks on the path to kindergarten readiness. Building a more diverse, effective and well-paid teaching workforce will stabilize the sector and create the conditions in which a universal child care system can succeed.
Both ROC the Future Alliance and the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet point out that StriveTogether has been instrumental to the Coalition’s success to this point. Brian credits the StriveTogether policy team with joining the Coalition’s very first call and laying out a 90-day plan for what the group could accomplish. “The Coalition met every goal in that plan and went well beyond it within about 30 days, an early sign of the strong momentum that would carry the group forward,” said Brian.
What started with two leaders meeting at the StriveTogether policy summit has grown into a strong and sustained statewide push, amplified by wide-reaching and effective place-based and cradle-to-career networks and driven by parents and grassroots community leaders.
With StriveTogether’s support, the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet, ROC the Future Alliance and the New York State Place-Based Policy Coalition will continue advocating for data-driven policies that center children, place-based strategies to achieve concrete local outcomes and fully funded support services. Together, they are building the kind of socioeconomic mobility that lasts, one child, one family and one community at a time.
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