A Year of Community, Collaboration & Impact
Reviewing 2025 with gratitude
Looking back on 2025, we first want to thank you for your support— whether you’ve joined us on webinars, contacted WNC legislators, or contributed resources, we’ve continued to strengthen our work with your help. Our vision is to see WNC children thrive with the support of exceptional early care and learning opportunities that are affordable, close to home, and tailored to family needs. Our mission is to ensure every child and family in WNC has access to high-quality early learning opportunities by leveraging the power of our mountain communities to advocate for public investment and practical policy solutions for child care.
Impact at a Glance
Network Building- One of our central strategies is to sustain and expand the coalition’s relational, community-driven, state-connected advocacy model. We have been building out our regional network through relational organizing and a nonpartisan approach. This has included training WNC ECC advocates on state legislative processes, advocacy strategies, and providing opportunities for them to engage in targeted advocacy activities , including legislative meetings and in-district child care convening.
Family and Provider Outreach Efforts - We have deepened our investment in family and provider outreach and training. In May 2025, we wrapped up our third cohort of the Budding Futures Forum (BFF), our family leader advocacy training program, and launched our current cohort in October.
BFF members have met with legislators, written letters to the editor and created video messages to be shared in campaign advocacy. Families are participating from Henderson, Jackson, Transylvania, Haywood, and Macon counties. We took three WNC child care providers to Raleigh to meet with their representatives and share how policies are impacting their businesses and the families they serve.
Annette Ward in Macon/Jackson County a returning member of BFF
WNC Storytelling Tour
If you haven’t heard about “Yes on Child Care,” let me be the first to introduce you to our flagship campaign. Yes on Child Care is a growing network of parents, teachers, policymakers, and business leaders supporting public investments to make quality child care affordable and accessible in Western North Carolina.
This year, we visited five childcare facilities around WNC and collected stories about why parents, teachers, and childcare staff are Yes on Child Care.
State Level Leadership - WNC ECC continues to work at the state level as a leading voice for early childhood advocacy, with a strong presence among policymakers, community leaders, and advocates. This past year, our state-level work focused on developing a pragmatic, winnable set of early childhood policy priorities owned by diverse state and local stakeholders.
In collaboration with NC Early Childhood Foundation, NC Early Education Coalition and MomsRising, we built a collaborative table of diverse child care advocacy organizations, co-led a 2025 policy planning process with this group to develop a shared statewide policy agenda for child care, and spent much of the year implementing this campaign.
At the end of June 2025, the NC Task Force on Child Care and Early Education released its interim report, which includes preliminary findings and recommendations. The top two recommendations from this report are the two policy priorities WNC ECC and statewide advocates prioritized for this year:
1) Set a statewide child care subsidy reimbursement rate floor.
2) Develop approaches to offer non-salary benefits to child care professionals.
The inclusion of these policies in the Task Force recommendations signals ground gained in visibility and support for our key policies.
WNC Child Care Recovery/Rebuild Network - In January 2025, we formally launched the WNC Child Care Recovery/Rebuild Network in partnership with the NC Helene Task Force on Child Care. The Network was created to ensure child care providers in Western NC have the information, coordination, and relationships needed for effective recovery.
The Network brings together child care providers, nonprofits, business leaders, local governments, and state and federal partners—including CCR&R, DCDEE, NC Commerce, FEMA, ACF, Head Start, Smart Start, councils of government, philanthropy, and chambers of commerce. Since January, it has met monthly with an average of 20–25 participants.
With engagement across local, state, and federal levels, this Network is helping guide both immediate and long-term policy advocacy to support child care as essential to WNC’s recovery over the next three years.
We want to thank our generous funders for their support, including NC Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation, Community Foundation of WNC, Dogwood Health Trust, Z. Smith Reynolds, Women for Women, as well as our private donors who have pledged their support. We also want to thank Children First Communities in Schools of Buncombe County, our fiscal sponsor, for their continued partnership in administering our work. We owe our accomplishments this year to all those who ensured we were able to continue the charge.