Web Site Details

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Administration for Children and Families, the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, the Child Care Bureau.

This web site is designed to provide practical information on creating and maintaining public-private partnerships to increase and improve child care in states and communities throughout the country. It draws from the experiences of successful partnerships at the national, state, and local levels to provide tools and materials for existing and future initiatives.

Partnerships for child care have become an important vehicle for drawing together the resources and know-how needed to make progress in improving child care in the United States. They are formed to improve the quality, increase the supply, or improve accessibility of child care in a community.

What is a Public-Private Partnership?
A public-private partnership for child care is one in which community members, government agencies, and private-sector organizations join together to expand and improve the capacity of a state or locality to meet the needs of young children and their families. While every partnership is unique in composition and the resources that support it, in all partnerships, each member contributes time, financial support, and/or expertise and works toward shared goals. (more)

Why Public-Private Child Care Partnerships are Created
The formation of public-private partnerships is an increasingly viable and popular strategy for improving the accessibility and quality of child care. These partnerships are formed for a variety of reasons, particularly due to the realization that no one sector or group can effectively address the need for quality child care services. In order to understand how and why partnerships are able to effectively mobilize public and private resources to increase and improve child care, it is critical to recognize that each perspective partner has a unique set of reasons for participating. (more)

What Public-Private Partnerships are Doing
Across the country, innovative efforts are underway to form productive public-private partnerships to improve child care. While all public-private partnerships share the overarching goal of improving child care, partnerships have been created for the more specific goals of:

		Increasing the quality of child care;
		Increasing the supply of high quality care;
		Providing technical assistance to employers on work-life issues (including child care);
		Raising revenue; and
		Building and improving state and community child care systems.

Many partnerships are employing similar approaches to meet these goals. (more)

Principles for Success
The experiences of existing partnerships point to ten guiding principles, which provide a useful framework for establishing successful public-private partnerships. (more)