Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Launches Statewide Campaign to Highlight Funding for Child Care Providers and Families

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul, with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, launched a statewide multi-media campaign to help ensure eligible families access child care assistance. Administered by the State Office of Children and Family Services, eligibility for child care assistance was expanded this month to include families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, which is up from 200 percent, extending eligibility to an estimated 394,000 young children throughout New York. As of this month, a family of four earning up to $83,250 is now eligible for child care assistance when previously, the threshold was $55,500 or less. Governor Hochul also announced expanded eligibility for a second round of federally funded Child Care Provider Stabilization grants. As of today, all school-age child care programs and more than 900 providers that were licensed by January 1, 2022 can apply for these grants.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Great to see you. We've got some incredible announcements here today. I'm so proud, first of all, proud to be here. This is an extraordinary institution.

I want to thank the Executive Director of Education Trust-New York, Dia Bryant, who you're going to hear from. But Sharon Greenberger, what you do with the YMCAs, YWCAs, is extraordinary. And I used to participate in YWCA training for candidates a long time ago. I became very involved in the community, but what you do for children across this city and this state is extraordinary. I want to thank you for hosting us here today. And also, we'll be hearing from Dia Bryant in a couple of minutes. Sheila Poole, the Commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services is here. There she is, right at the end. I want to thank her for what she does.

Also, I am blessed to have great partners also in Washington. And none other than Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who's joined us here today. Let's give her a huge round of applause. Back when I was Lieutenant Governor, I used to go around the state with Kirsten Gillibrand, putting a spotlight on the needs of families and working parents, primarily working moms and how there were so many child care deserts all over the state. So, even before the pandemic, the two of us were committed in seeing what we could do at the federal level teaming up with the State. And so, I just want to applaud her for all she has done as a champion and advocate for stressed out moms, something we both know a little bit about our experiences. But also, how you fight for us using your voice for the people of our state, especially the most vulnerable every single day in Washington D.C. So, let's give her another round of applause.

So, we've been on this journey together. This is not a new event for us. It's something we've been talking about doing, working on for years. And so all it is is about improving access to quality child care across the State of New York. So, I want to talk in a couple minutes about some of the steps that we've taken to accomplish this, but I want to thank her specifically, and our Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer and President Biden, and all our leaders in Washington teaming up to allow states to secure billions and billions of dollars in federal assistance. So, we can meet the needs of our families with respect to child care. So before we get into that, you know, I see the Senator and I'm reminded there was a number of years ago when I was a staffer for a Senator, probably in the same office you're in. Senator Moynihan, Senator Moynihan's office. Young mom - I had my career ahead of me, all excited. And we are blessed with my son, our son, and all of a sudden realized like, "Well, who's going to watch the baby when I go back to work?" No family support. They all lived back home in New York and realize back then that I'd have to sacrifice the income, my ambition, and just try to figure it all out on my own because it was not that sense of any responsibility to individual families. This was your problem, you figured out. And I've always thought that at this age now when that son is now a father of a four-month-old today that things would get better and they are getting better. At least there's an acknowledgement.

There's a sense of responsibility from government to help lift the burden on families, not just because it's the right thing to do, but women in the workforce are part of an economic engine that we can no longer have suppressed because that's what's been happening. So, I was able to get back to work, eventually. Obviously, I'm working right now, but too many parents and moms aren't as lucky as I was to be able to get back on the path. And the presumption always was, as I said, this is your problem, you deal with it. But how can we overlook the fact that this has a profound impact on our economy?

We have to deal with people out of the workforce who want to be in the workforce. So, here's a challenge. I mean, it's a well-known phenomenon that we have a child care crisis. There's just not enough child care slots in the first place. And secondly, if they do exist, they're just too expensive. They're out of reach for everyday New Yorkers. So, the dual crisis of availability and affordability is something we talked about, but this is all before the pandemic. It was bad before the pandemic, and all of a sudden the sky fell in. And I wrote an op-ed literally two weeks after the pandemic and spoke about who's being hardest hit during the pandemic. Well, it was the moms, the working women who many of them had jobs, or they couldn't Zoom into life. They still had to go out and help take care of sick people in hospitals, or work at the stores and help get the groceries out to people. I mean, they had so much stress. But who's watching their kids because guess what? The schools are shut down, the child care centers are shut down. So, what a toxic brew here, and put all that weight primarily on moms and many of them were single moms.

So, we had a real crisis. And as I mentioned, we had this beforehand. At the time, you compare us to other nations, the average, other rich countries would spend about $14,000 a year on helping families. Here in the U.S., it's about $500. No comparison, and many New Yorkers were already spending 40 percent of their income on child care, but then everything just imploded. And it was really hardest hit in Black and Brown communities, because these are more likely to be the frontline workers, unfortunately, the lower wage jobs. And their support system collapsed as well, when the child care centers had to shut down. So, it's devastating. It took people off the track they were, and eliminated their wages, their earning potential for years to come.

And it also had a devastating impact on our children. We're still reeling with the effects of what it was for children to be taken out of their normal environment, security of being in an environment where teachers understand them. There's other classmates, the comfort that they had. That was denied them all that time of trying to learn at home. And we're still dealing with the fallout. But New York State lost over 2,000 child care programs. And I'm not talking about slots, I'm talking about programs. And over 20,000 child care slots that were there before the pandemic when things were still really tight. Those are gone now as well. And nationally, there's over a million fewer women working all across the country than they were in February of 2020, direct impact of the pandemic.

So last week, on Women's Equality Day, I directed the Department of Labor to study the pandemic's impact on women, particularly in communities of color and talk about solutions and ideas, and that's going to take a little while, but I still want to get my arms around it. We can't ignore the fact that this phenomenon happened, and that'll be out by this time next year, but I'm not waiting. I don't need numbers to tell me we've got a real problem. And so we're making sure that New Yorkers, New York families are not left out in the cold any longer. In my very first budget as your Governor, we secured a historic $7 billion to address child care. $7 billion. Almost $16 million went to expand child care at SUNY and CUNY campuses because we want people to better themselves and get those higher-wage jobs. They need that credential, they need that certificate, or they need that actual degree. How do they get that when they've got little kids taken behind them? So now we say, "You come, better yourself, we'll help take care of your kids, so ultimately you can take care of your family and to be part of our family and being very productive, working." So that's why we're focusing on those.

Also, we've got a lot of children who are the children of farmworkers. Not so many in this neighborhood, I'm going to guess, but the Senator was just at the State Fair yesterday. I was there last week. There's a very rural part of our state, with a lot of poverty. But especially for those farmworkers who come, who's taking care of them? So we've put over almost $14 million into those centers where we can provide child care services to farmworkers' families. $50 million for child care capital program, because we have to build new buildings. The design, the construction, the furnishing, all these equipment expenses. And last month, we announced the second tranche of grants to go to new and existing child care providers operating basically in the child care deserts, so areas of our state that have been identified that do not meet the needs of the communities. So, thus far we've allocate over $100 million of the funding to create nearly 12,000 new child care slots in child care deserts. So that's what we've already done. But now we're investing $2 billion into subsidies. What does the subsidy do? Well, it says to the family, "You're not on your own. This does not all have to come out of your pocket, because it just doesn't add up. You're earning minimum wage, and you're spending up to $27,000 a year for a preschooler and a new, an infant."

Okay, do the math. That does not work at all. So now we have subsidies which will benefit a family to tune of over $9,000 per child, $9,000 per child.

We also broadened the eligibility. It used to be that families earning up to $55,000 for a family of four were eligible for subsidies. We're doing our budget, and I'm trying to make the statewide budget add up. How does a family sitting at their dinner table make this, add up? So, I said, "Let's go higher, let's go big." Now the number is $83,000 a year for family up to that. We went up to 300 percent of the poverty level instead of some of the earlier proposals that I just did not think were bold enough.

So we made all these changes, and also the reason we could do that again? Senator Gillibrand. She made sure, constantly communicating - what do you need? How much do you need? Because I'm going to get this done for you. And I'm so grateful to have her, because of her efforts, working collaboratively, we now have the ability to expand access to over 400,000 New York children. That's half of New York children now eligible for these expanded services.

But what I'm announcing today is like, people need to know about this. What is shocking to me right now is that only 12 percent of families eligible for child care assistance are taking advantage of it. They don't know about it. And here we are adding even more, making it easier on them, but if they don't know about it, it doesn't matter. It hasn't helped them. They're still struggling out there. So we're launching a multimedia marketing campaign for the next few months to let families know what's available for them. We're going to target social media, radio, highway billboards, bus posters, going to nail salons, barber shops, wherever everybody wants to hang out, take a sign, we'll get the information out there. And especially targeting Hispanic and African American communities. Let's just get the information into the communities so they understand very simply how to make sure that they can secure this assistance. So, we're doing that starting very shortly.

Also today, I'm announcing that we're accepting the second round of child care provider stabilization grants. That's open to school age child care providers and over 900 - this is a big number - 900 new child care providers that have been licensed just since January. I said, "Speed it up, get them out the door." 900 new providers. So, that'll be paid for with $343 million in federal money. Thank you again, Senator Gillibrand.

We're also providing assistance to the workforce. When you think about child care providers, the people go in every day and basically parent our children for us on our behalf, they're also the first teachers. I told them, we were going around during the pandemic, I said, "At the time, you are the essential workers for the essential workers."

So now we have to bolster them up. A lot of people left the workplace. They have their own families to take care of, a lot of stress on them. So now we want to make sure those individuals are getting assistance. So, we're going to have 75 percent of grants go directly to workforce supports - wage increases, overdue wage increases, bonuses, tuition reimbursement - and help them with their healthcare and retirement contributions. That's how we help the ecosystem thrive. You help bring more workers in, you support those workers, you get them on their jobs. You open more facilities, you give the construction grants and then you take care of families and make more of them eligible. That's how we lift families up in the State of New York, by investing in their ability to take care of their families during this short time when they need it because we cannot afford to lose them in the workplace, but it's also just the right thing to do.

I'm proud of these efforts. As long as I'm Governor, I will not stop fighting every single day for New York families and especially our children to give them the very best start in life. And I'm looking forward to continuing to work with incredible partners like Senator Gillibrand. And I think we're officially declaring powder blue is the color of fighting for child care.