 Welcome to the backstory on one of the lowest profile but highest stakes needs in Longmont, Colorado and every other community in the United States. My name is Tim Waters and I've been invited by the Longmont Observer and Longmont Public Media to moderate conversations of leaders, advocates, experts and policymakers on topics of interest and relevance to Longmont Area residents. This month we're focusing on young families with young children concerned that we are failing both because of insufficient childcare and early childhood learning opportunities in Longmont. Every story about an issue or problem you read in the newspaper or on the Longmont Observer website has a backstory. The backstory, a backstory that is typically more interesting and engaging than what gets reported as news. This month we're telling a story that is understood all too well by moms, dads and grandparents with children and grandchildren under the age of six. It's a story that is less well understood by business owners and primary employers, but one with huge implications for them. It's one that seldom draws the kind of intensity of attention and support it deserves from local policymakers. Yet, because of its implications for nearly every goal or objective, the school board members, city council members and county commissioners establish when setting priorities, it's one about which we all need to learn more. Indeed, it is the backstory of a challenge so complex, so pervasive of such consequence and of such significance that we're telling it in a series of no less than three of these podcasts. These will be produced and posted in sequence on the Longmont Public Media website. The video of these will run over channel eight and on the Longmont channel on YouTube. So just for anybody who watches this, understand we've done eight of these. They're all posted on the Longmont Observer website. They've all been audio podcasts. This is our first video in audio podcast. So we're learning our way forward. So if if you have feedback to share with us on how to make this more engaging and entertaining and informative, we'll appreciate that. This podcast I'm joined by four outstanding panelists. Danielle Butler immediately to me immediately to my left is the executive director of the Boulder County Early Childhood Council. Jessica Erichie to my right is the CEO of the Longmont Economic Development Partnership. And she is now Richard Garcia to my left is a founder of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition. He's a member of the Boulder Valley School Board and I will add he is the proud father of a candidate for the United States Senate in the state of Colorado. Garcia Garcia who will be a one of our panelists in the third of these podcasts and Dr Bob Norris who is a local activist. Bob has dedicated his life in Longmont to issues of consequence. Bob is also a board member of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition. So with that, I'm going to stop. I'm going to talk less and listen more. I'm going to start by asking our panelists to share a little bit about themselves and what draws them to this area of interest in this podcast. Richard, let's start with you. Thank you, Tim. And thank you for the introduction and thank you for that. I'm Garcia who is running for the United States Senate. If you're wondering what this is, this is a volunteer circulator and all of her work is going to be on the ground volunteers. She doesn't have the millions of dollars like everybody else does. But anyway, that's another story. And you mentioned that I was the founder of the Statewide Parent Coalition, which was founded in 1980, got a long history. And primary purpose of that particular organization is to give parents a heads up, giving them information and also provide them with the skills that they need to make sure that their children have the same opportunities that other children have. One thing about me that many people probably don't know is that I used to teach early childhood education at the community college of Denver for about five years. And I created the bilingual child development social credential program at the community college of Denver that was approved by the council for professional recognition in Washington. Everyone came out of that particular program was eligible to apply for a CDA credential, which in Colorado is one of the requirements that the chorus shine program has in order for people to be competent job care providers. During that time, one of the things that I learned is, and I'm talking about way back in the eighties, something called that we turned at that time the trilemma. Well, let's come back, we're going to start with the trilemma, but we're going to go through the introduction before we come right back to it. Danielle. Hi there. Yes, so my introduction to a world of early childhood came about through working in community consultation years ago. And I ended up working in a childcare program and at the government level. And what I discovered quite quickly and kept my interest all these years is the socio not economic impact that a healthy childcare system has in the local community. It's a very interesting place to work. So yes, I'm dedicated to children and children's well-being and their success in life. Most of the people in our area probably come from it from that direction, but I come from it slightly different from the interest in policy planning and community development. So, and then along the way, the information and the research and the studies and feedback around the extremely powerful impacts of healthy social emotional development of children. How that has lifelong impacts just increases my interest and commitment in the field in my mind. And I know just enough about your background to know that part of what drew you to this area of work is your own experience as a mom when your kids were younger and the difficulty in finding the kind of quality reliable care that you knew that they needed. That's right. That's right. I'm a consumer of childcare in Boulder County myself. My daughter is now 18 and just about to graduate high school. So she started in childcare at two and a half when we moved back to Boulder County. So, and in fact, yeah, so each year and things change for our family every year childcare and your childcare arrangements have to change because the child growth and the needs change. And in fact, an employee of mine and a colleague of mine have asked me to sit down and talk about what did you do over the summers when your child was small. And there's a number of strategies, personal strategies I have, but they've also asked me, you know, what are the local strategies? What programs can I use? And I'm going to have to tell them that, you know, it's a patchwork system. And you're on your own because unfortunately, our early childhood system for birth to lives is still very fragmented. In just a few minutes, we're going to get to these questions. There's going to be a point in time where I'm going to ask this panel to talk about what's happening here right now that may or may not be different than what's happening in other places. Because it's what's behind what's happening now is to try to do less patchwork and more tapestry or weaving together, right? What the whole cloth is of a systematic, reliable, high quality approach that serves every child, not just some. I like that visual. All right, I'm going to go to my right. Jessica is not only the CEO, and as I mentioned, is an expected mom. And so you have perspectives here that are big and really focused. Tell us about you and what draws you to this. Yes, thank you. Thanks for including me on this panel. I think we get question about the correlation between early childhood education and economic development. So look forward to having the opportunity to talk about that a little bit today. Just on my background, I have been doing economic development on the front range in Colorado for about 17 years now from Runefield to Thornton. Now Longmont spent a couple of years in the governor's office that have a broad perspective of the region in terms of economic development. And one thing that's different today than what we've seen in the past about economic development is the focus on talent, talent development and talent attraction. Where goes talent is where goes business investment, job creation opportunity and a growing economy. And a piece of that today is availability of early childhood and quality of education in general for the talent that we're trying to attract and develop here. So that's where I think we fit into the conversation and look forward to making that correlation as part of this conversation. No doubt if the city is going to be successful on these other objectives we've set, economic development and workforce preparation is part of that. If we don't get this part of the equation right, all those other efforts become a little sub-optimized. So just tangential to that, the private sector interest in this goes beyond just recruiting big business because of that talent recruitment effort. And the listeners will learn that this coalition around this topic has grown, the American Association of University Women has become, have become involved. But they started, before they got involved with this, they started with focus on a living wage. And realized fairly quickly that a living wage is very relative to what's happening with housing, availability and attainability and affordability and childcare. So all those conversations we hear about economic development and living wages, if we don't get this right, those again become just hypotheticals if we don't have it right here. Bob, you've been in this field for a long time. We're an entire chemical engineer. Yeah, a long time. No, I'm a chemist. That's illegal. I mean, you're trying to be an engineer. And our introduction to you was as an activist, and you've got your, you've got your interest in a number of places, but this is one you've devoted a lot of time and energy. And can somebody look at that and say, well, what's what we draw guys our age into this kind of conversation? Why are you here? Okay, as I kind of moved out of being a environmental consultant and looking for something to do by chance, almost across the street, I would end up going to a one day volunteer ended up on the board ended up on the board of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition and Hispanic Education Foundation, which is the other end of this, getting ways to help people get to college. So in all of that experience, I've become very aware of the many ways that the Hispanic community is not getting as much opportunities as those of us that are more fortunate. And I particularly became aware of the achievement gap, which you can read about frequently and the trends report from the community foundation. So about three and a half years ago, Richard asked me to lunch. And shortly after that, I ended up on the board of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, which turned out to be a good thing. Even if you move down a few months after I was in the board because maybe you couldn't take me too long. Anyway, Richard and I became the three of us, Richard, Tim and Bob Plotchy and I started meeting at my house about a year ago, talking about this issue and in the meantime, and we'll talk more about it. We had the mayor's childcare forum, and we had another meeting at the in the fall, I think, September 13. At the museum, because the state wanted to know why there's fewer daycare. So this kind of all comes together and it means was what's important to me is that folks that don't look like me and by that I mean white haven't had the opportunities that I can. And so I need to try to and at the same time to try to help in a way that I don't use my white privilege to force my way on the other people's ideas. So I'm glad to be working with all. All right, here we go. So to tee up the content of this conversation. I want to remind listeners and viewers that Longmont City Council has adopted seven goals for the city. These goals include priorities like housing, economic development, environmental protection, workforce preparation, which I mentioned a bit ago. One of these goals reads like this, we'll have an integrated system to that system of system integrated systems approach that leverages human and social capital to provide high quality pre K learning opportunities for all of our children. So that they have a good start in life. Now, with that thought in mind, the focus of the podcast is early childhood education and childcare. This panel, I've asked to be prepared to address the kind of the big picture on those issues. I've heard talk about a trilemma, not a deal, but a trilemma that states counties and municipalities face when taking on challenges of early childhood education and childcare. So I want to start the conversation by asking Richard to give us his kind of overview of the trilemma and then we'll get a move from there. Thank you again, Tim. Let me kind of give you a little bit of background in terms of the trilemma. If you go back in history, like to the late 70s, 80s, there was a lot of publicity because of childcare providers getting in trouble, kids being placed in danger. All of those things were happening. Particularly in our county, there were issues that came up. So many of the professionals at that time were looking at what can we do to improve the quality of early learning opportunities in the state of Colorado. So we met and we were meeting constantly trying to look at that problem. So as a result of that, because of quality being at the peak of the triangle, if you will, then we're looking at, okay, what can we do to improve the quality of early learning opportunities? One is to make sure that you have highly qualified providers in those particular areas. So then you have a number of private early learning providers also that were particularly that were involved in the conversations. So the providers were saying, okay, so if we increase the quality, that means that we're going to have to pay more for our providers. So if we pay more, then we're going to have to get the money from someplace. So the money's going to come from the tuition that we're going to charge our clients that bring it to our centers. So if we charge more, then you're dealing with affordability at that time and who can afford to pay more. And if we charge more, then you're dealing with this whole issue of accessibility. Because if you look at who has access to high quality childcare centers. At that time, you don't have CCAP either, by the way. CCAP, Colorado Child Assistance Program. So who is going to provide the opportunity or the assistance, let's say, for people that are in the low income bracket to be able to send their kids to these particular quality childcare centers. So in those days, you had basically head start. Okay, that was taking care of kids that were four year olds. You didn't have other stuff. You didn't have any head start in those days. And then there were families that couldn't afford it. So they would take their kids to the auntie to take care of their kids while they went to work. Or they would take their kids to the friend next door or the neighbor next door or a friend to take care of the kids. So that's how this trilemma came about in terms of quality, cost, equity and accessibility. Right. And we've been dealing with that since then. And what's different now from then is that childcare is now way up here in terms of the discussion that many policymakers are having, whether it be a city, whether it be a county, whether it be the state. But yet, with the exception of one city that I know, which is the city of Longmont, they have not provided any kind of financial assistance to anything. Okay, to make this trilemma start going away. And it's a small amount that the city of Longmont is providing. However, it's something. The other issue, I don't know if any of you remember Don Horton, who used to work for the public health department. Don Horton had this, I don't know whether it was an attraction or what it was, but he wanted to know more about an informal childcare network in Boulder County. And then he came to the statewide parent coalition and asked, could you guys do a study on that and figure out if there is an informal childcare network in Boulder County? And so certainly we'll do that. So we, the statewide parent coalition conducted a study in Boulder County to find out where is this informal childcare network? Does it exist? And where is it? So we started looking at holding focus groups with neighbors, with friends, with a whole bunch of folks to find out if they were caring for kids in their home. And lo and behold, there's a huge network of family-friendly neighborhood childcare providers in Boulder County. And then we were asking, well, what do you need to make your job a lot better, a lot easier? And they said, we need training. We need to do more with that. So lo and behold, through the statewide parent coalition, working arm in arm with the city of Boulder in those days, because you didn't have the council, you had, it was called something else. I can't remember what it was. The early childhood council. It was, yeah, we were still the council. We were just with the city of Boulder, but that was a fun project. Right, but it was their own nonprofit because the state didn't have a state law that gave birth to the councils. Okay. But it was a council. I shouldn't want to confuse it with city council. Right. But I want to get some, I want to get other people and show them. Okay. So very quickly, because of the vision that many of these people had in the council. They wrote a proposal to the federal government. And it was the last grant that the Early Learning Opportunity Act provided and provided the city of Boulder with about very close to a million dollars to continue to work on early childhood education. And possible providers that that seems to not come to support from that, which gave the training and gives the training continues to do that to family, friend, neighbor, childcare providers. But anyway, you understand the tri-lema that we're in. And until we get government entities or some other funding source to be able to support that tri-lema, we're going to be in a tri-lema for a long time. We're going to not just support it so much as to address it or overcome it. Address it and support it. Yeah. Well, it's a great, it's a great visual quality access or accountability for accessibility and accessibility. All right. Well, part of what we're doing right now in a long month is a legacy to the work that you've been working, the work you've been doing for decades. Danielle, as the as the executive director of the child council, Boulder County, what you take on this, both in terms of a challenge and what you see as opportunities moving forward. Yes, it's true. We have been working on the same thing for many years, but that's how long this work takes. We're working at the local level, but it's a national conversation and it's even an international conversation. Early childhood and our understanding of it is growing leaps and bounds, at least in the last 20 or more years that's been involved. So talking about the tri-lema, other times it's called the availability, accessibility and affordability of childcare. And when I first started, we used to talk about it as the three-legged stool. So with your three-legged stool, you've got one leg that's real short or missing, you don't have a stool that stands up. And you're constantly shoring up one of those legs, working on one of those legs as you build the system, as you build awareness. So the capacity is interesting and it's helpful in Longmont. Longmont has 81 licensed childcare facilities. So those are centers, preschools, and family childcare homes. So when you look at availability, is that enough? Is that enough for Longmont? And then accessibility, that means are they in the right place? Can parents find them? Can they get to them? Do they open in time? Do they stay open long enough for a working parent? And do they have the right programs? Do we need bilingual programs? Do we need special needs? So those are the issues that we look at in accessibility. And then affordability is the issue of these. Who pays for this in looking at this fragmented system? So, you know, K through 12, we know what that looks like. We know that there's public funding in place and there's school boards that decide how many are spent on curriculum and teachers and bricks and mortar. In the birth to five area, it's scared by parent fees. So these are young parents or parents of young children. And what else do they have on their financial docket? They have mortgages, they have health insurance. All of these costs are a lot more expensive than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And the intensity of pressure that we put on young families is just too much. So that's a part of looking at all of this too. Does that help? It does. I just recently had a chance to visit with a team at one of our one of our premier local child care. Well, from actually zero to five centers. And as we were talking about costs, it was clear that given the hours that parents were working in the hours children would be involved. They could enroll their children in the preschool program for about the same costs as they could at university come up. It's that steep in some cases. That's true. You know, there's something in the early childhood field where we work, the needs are so urgent and we're always tackling the next problem or going for the next grant. Because there isn't funding, so we have to fund it through grant opportunities or if we can have some vision at a city council that will put some money on the table or the state. But what something we don't do is we don't stop enough to look at how far we have come. So the story isn't all sad news. We have made some big strides. The CCAP system, Child Care Systems Program across the state of Colorado is funded better than ever now. And there's groups and people looking at that and figuring out how to fund it even better. Boulder County is one of the leading counties as far as figuring out additional funds for that program. That would be a whole nother interesting forecast. But there are happy stories there. We have made progress. There's just so much more to do. And I would like to see it really shift towards the parents that we have now. We have millennial parents and we even have Gen Z starting to have kids. We've got to ask them how they think and how they feel and what they need. Because it may not be what I needed, you know, 15 years ago. So as we move forward with this, I'm going to switch this over to Jessica. As I hear you describe the fact that we do have, or should we have, we do have good news stories. We've made progress since 1970. What triggers for me is how big a change is this in society generally? In Colorado more specifically than really specifically in Longwood. And while we made progress, I still think it's for some people a pretty big change from where we've been to where we're going. And which I think requires all of us to be really clear on our theories of change and what motivates people. In my view, people are motivated by desperation or aspiration or some combination. And I hope it's the combination in this case that keeps us moving aspirationally towards a better future. Understanding that some people are really struggling right now with access and affordability and even as we see quality improve. Jessica, not a hypothetical for LEDP. So the implications are serious for you as a CEO. I just, people should know when I asked Jessica to serve on this panel, she initially deferred out of the people who bring more information. I said, I don't think so. You're the poster child for why this is so important in Longwood and everything. You are high profile, very successful, prominent, valued CEO in this community. You should not be in a position of making either or decisions. Why don't you become a mom? So in order to keep you where we would like you when you're CEO seat, it seems to me you and many women and dads just like you deserve for policy makers and others to take a serious look at how can we manage both of these challenges or respond to both of our needs, talent here and care for your newborn as he or she comes along. So talk about from a CEO perspective why this is so important from LEDP. Sure. Thank you. Thank you for the kind words. I appreciate that. So I'm going to start big picture and then talk a little bit about kind of me personally and and where I'm at in some of the considerations that we're having to make as a family as we get ready to have our little one in a couple months. So I think from an economic development perspective and a policy perspective, it wouldn't surprise most people to know that most children in this country are raised in households that have to have working parents or where both parents or the only parents in the household is working and that generally when the need arises, like in the case of a newborn child that it's typically the female adult who stays home, whether that be for medical reasons or newborn reasons or a variety of other reasons. That's typically what happens. I think it might be a bit more surprising that as of 2017, most recent data that's available, nearly half of mothers in this country are the sole or primary breadwinners in their households. And that increases exponentially when you start to look at minority populations and people in poverty. And this has been true for over a decade. But the reality is that workplace and public policies, like some of those that we're talking about today, don't reflect this reality. They're typically based on the premise that families have easy access to a caregiver that can stay home and not have to work. But that person is female, which is generally true. And that this will have no impact on the economics of the family, or that family's ability to contribute to their local or state economies through consumer spending through home ownership through all the other things that all the other economic pressures that families have today. So I think where employers can start to address some of those policies and have their employer policies start to match the reality of the world today, they're going to have more success in attracting and retaining talent. And then we as policymakers are you as policymakers, both at the local and state level being able to match public policy with the reality of the world today is going to result in our ability to continue to attract and retain talent, such as myself, that is needed in a community to keep our economy strong and vibrant. When I think about my story personally, though, which I've done a lot since talking to Tim about participating in this podcast and thinking about the goal of city council to create a good start in life for all children in our community. I start to think about my desire obviously to create a good start in life for my child when she's born in a couple of months. And then thinking about that from the perspective of that trial amount of quality and affordability and availability of childcare here in our community. Obviously the affordability piece speaks to my ability to create a good economic start in life for my child quality, a good social, social emotional and intellectual start to life, and then availability just general quality of life for our family, and being able to have access to that resource in our community becomes incredibly important in this situation. So the reality of our situation is that we are going to have to take that into consideration when we think about where our family ends up in the future, where we have access to that quality affordability and availability. And I have to say, I do appreciate the City of Longmont for addressing this. It's timely for me, obviously, but really appreciate that there are people like you and like Councilman Waters that are really looking at this closely for people like me and some of the others that are working in our community. So I'm going to, Jessica just referred to me as Councilman Waters. I wear a volunteer hat when we do these things. No fact. Well, it's hard to take your councilperson hat off. And put it back on. Just him. But I will say, with my council hat on, we do get to hear a lot of what you just said you were referred to quality of life. One of the foundational principles of some of what your concerns and our concerns are. And as a council member, I do hear a lot in conversations. I read a lot about quality of life concerns. And most of the time those are, there's a grounded in, we've got too much traffic, we're growing too rapidly. Or we don't have enough housing for the homeless. And sometimes those sound contradictory to me that if you want to house the homeless, we need more, we need more homes. And I do it in a smart way and I get the frustration with traffic. But at the end of the day, both of those issues, housing, traffic congestion, as they're, as they're defined as quality of life issues are all quality of life issues for people who've already achieved some measure quality life in many cases. We're not talking about a population that are totally dependent on us. If they're going to experience quality of life from the day they're born or in their first or that first trimester right in the in Europe. So I do think it's I do think we need to think about this as a community as a quality of life issue for everybody. Giving a good certain life. One of the ways to do that is to enhance the quality of life and access opportunity. Bob, you've been in this for a long, long time. Again, why would you spend so much time and energy as a guy who's achieved what you've achieved professionally. I get to a stage stage in life where you have a chance to choose to do anything you want to with your days, your nights, your your interests, and and still be so engaged here with guys like Richard. You mentioned a couple of old guys who've been this conversation with you. I want to talk to you about the old guys, except I want to talk about why you as one of the old guys stay. It's all a little correction. I'm married so I can't do everything. But that's a good thing. No, there's lots of ways to look at this thing. And over the last year, if we met and we keep finding more benefits to having quality early childhood education, and a bit more about why it's causing a lot of trouble. I actually brought this up to a group that's run by the district attorney called access to justice. And I didn't get any pushback when I said, you know, the disadvantage that minorities and low income people have of not having the same access to the early childhood education as a lot of us that we're making good money. It really is an access to justice, because it's an injustice when we give a certain part of the population less access to something that's so important is early childhood education, and how that plays out because children that have quality early childhood education are more likely to graduate from high school go to college, graduate from college and have a sustainable salary that they can support their family. And maybe the members of their families that didn't get that. Well, that's why I kind of see this as my duty to try to do things for other people that I didn't have to put up with. I know I would be kindergarten but I really can't remember that far back, just what happened as a by the way, not an old guy as useful to experience. So all these experiences to people in this conversation. We have a whole list of questions I'm not going to get to, because of the way we try to keep this with any reasonable amount of time as a podcast. I'm just going to jump to a couple of like lightning round questions. Why should a city, given the fact that this is a federal issue state issue. Why should why would city councils why do you think city should councils should be focusing focusing on and budgeting for early childhood childcare and formal and informal education. It's the right thing to do. Truly it's the right thing to do. If a while ago you mentioned, making sure that the awareness is out there. But I think it's more than just awareness. I think it's awareness plus support. And if we don't have the support coming from somewhere, for example, the childcare assistance program comes from the federal government. And it flows over here to the counties. And in some counties, the childcare assistance is so low that they give to a family that it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense when they have to pay this tremendous amount of tuition to send a kid to a quality childcare facility. So it only makes sense that the money comes from somewhere and it's got to come probably for us to pay the taxes, because we all pay taxes. And it's got to be so compelling and I and I love what you said in terms of when you're looking at the, the talent that you want to retain and stuff like that. That's so compelling for city government for county government for state government to start thinking about. And I think that it's the right thing to do. And I really appreciate what city council is doing because you had the political will to get it done. Let's keep it moving. Okay, well, I'm going to say it's the powerful thing to do because those dollars that a local area invest for one, they stay local and they multiply. And for another, the impacts are immediate those children that are served they age out very quickly but you'd serve them and you've done the right thing we have. I know that the city of Longmont is going to be investing in evidence based programs proven strategies. And that's exciting and the money staying local I like to see it turn over and over again in a local community and create strength and quality life. So listen to the second of these podcasts will focus on the some of the evidence evidence based program and what we're doing with that, both formal and informal learning opportunities in one month with another outstanding panel lightning round. Okay, so we talk about expense, but there is a trick return. The usual mantra is the return on investment is 715. So I don't think the city council is investing in that seven or $15 for every dollar we spend. Yes. And also there's things that we don't think about. It's apparent doesn't have to be staying home and kids, they're working, and they're buying stuff in the community. So that decreases the overall cost, and they're paying other taxes, and we're not needing to provide as many benefits for people so there is a return. That's not always obvious that you reduce costs society. Yes, right. What we know is high school graduates, graduates live longer lives with with less expense for health care, less social costs for incarceration and the, you know, the, the other kinds of consequences of insufficient access to education, and the place to start that is when they're born right Jessica. I think I mean from an economic development perspective the ROI of investment in any level of education within a community is significant. I don't think there's any point in history or geographic location that you can point to that has invested in education to create opportunity and wealth within their community that that investment has not paid a return. And so I think thinking about it from that perspective. The Longmont Economic Development Partnership and with the city of Longmont has really taken an economic development approach approach. That was really came out of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute coming from a book called the Metropolitan Revolution and then a follow on book called the new localism, which really says that regions and cities need to take the reins and some of these bigger transformational initiatives rather than waiting for our federal and state governments, which in a lot of cases are in kind of a fiasco right now, rather than just sitting and waiting for those resources to trickle down and come and address those issues for us. So those are things like transportation, education, early childhood education, even innovation and entrepreneurship things where resources a lot of times historically had come from federal and state governments that we just can't wait for anymore if we want to have successful, viable, resilient local economies not just for us today but for our children and our children's children into the future. All right, I'll start with you come the other direction. This is there are two more questions. The last one's any closing thoughts but this one is, if people who listen to this or watch this video are motivated to become part of what is a growing business around this topic of providers, parents, early childcare, givers, advocates or activists. How do they do it. So are there opportunities through LEDP. Are there ways for you for your organization to bring people into the fold on this and the other things that you do it. Here are we actually just formally adopted advanced long want 2.0 which is our updated economic development strategy, which really focuses on a collective impact structure that brings all members of the community into these conversations, as well as into the active work of economic development in our community with one of the focus areas being talent part of wine here today, and one of the strategic initiatives within our talent focus area, being around early childhood education and so advanced dot long want org is the website you can see all of the data that backs that economic development strategy, including some around education and talent, and also look at the action plans that are there and get our contact information to be able to participate whether it be talent or place making or transportation or industry growth working groups that we have actively working now. And the key to all that is the collective action strategy in theory of action and that's where a broad base, it can get involved and move the dial. Yes, thank you. So same question. Are there opportunities for people to get involved. Oh, they're motivated by listening to us. Of course. No, this group that started about a year ago that's gone from four to 40 plus and you mentioned the members. We're meeting on February 10 at the same caption. I say Stevens, the second Monday of everyone right at two o'clock and everybody's welcome. Every time we have a meeting some more people come. And it's really been important to have all these different voices, because that's how you're right. It's three o'clock. I'm always right. Yeah, that's a different. But anyway, we welcome everybody to come. We need your voices. We need your thoughts, particularly if you're somebody who has struggled with this issue of providing childcare for your children. Okay, how can you get involved. Well, there's a long one coalition we just talked about. That's the place to go. If you're online, you can visit the early childhood council Boulder County website. www.eccboldercounty.org. And then there's plenty of places to get involved there. But what I'd say if you're at home and you're feeling like, Oh, gotta do something. Read, read to your child, put your phone down and read to your child. That's something you can do right away. You don't have to wait on anybody else. You mentioned a while ago, Bob, that as a privileged white person that that's what drove you to work for minorities or work with minorities and Latinos in our county here and all over the state of Colorado. I like that because one of the things that I live by, and that is the whole mantra of don't do for me without me. So for the Latino community that's out there. Los que hablan español se pueden volver con la coalición de pares de estado colorado y también con el paso engage Latino parents advancing students outcomes. Those are opportunities that I think our Latino community can actually go get and become super involved in terms of early care and education in Boulder County and also the city of Long Island. Providers advancing student outcomes is a program that was created by the state way parent coalition that provides high intensity. Childcare and development classes for Latino parents so that they can become qualified in quality childcare providers. For the city of Long Island, and if you know that in Colorado over 60% of the 60% of the kids that are in childcare are in family friend and neighbor childcare. So we can't forget that. Okay, so let me just add that real quickly to things one, we're starting to do the programs in English now. And the other thing, we are opening another set of trainings for Paso in Long Island on March 3rd, I think it's the right date so you can go on our website and figure out how to reach in otherwise you can just contact me. All right, any one sense last thoughts. Anybody. Good. If not, I'll wrap it up. Yes. Well, I was, I was going to, I do want to swing back to emphasizing that early care and education is a gender equity issue and it is a community equity issue. Early care and education is an identified social determinant of health. We get it right and we contribute to the life long wellness of that individual and the circle. Right. And then what that does to is really go against this whole racist attitude of achievement gaps. And I'll just take the opportunity then to also reinforce that it's also an economic development issue. A good friend of mine and colleague coined the term a number of years ago more than a decade ago, the Colorado paradox that talks about this idea that we have one of the most highly educated workforces in the country while investing at the very lowest level 48, 49, 47 in public education, K through 12 education in this state and that's been as a result of our ability to attract talent to this state are net in migration has outpaced every other state in the country for most years that I've been doing this and the reality though is that we're at a tipping point because one of the ways that we've been able to attract that kind of affordability that doesn't exist anymore. We are the most expensive markets off of the coast in this country. And so as that affordability factor goes away. So goes away our ability to continue to attract that level of talent, which further reinforces the need to invest in education at all levels early childhood, K through 12 and higher education for students and children in this state growing born in the state and growing up in the state. Very quickly, I'm glad you mentioned the color paradox because every child education crosses politics and party lines and all of that stuff because the paradox was identified by the public and administration. All right, I'm going to wrap it up. We started this with asking the question. Why would we why would any city be involved with this my answer was, because the stakes are so high that if we don't get this right for all of us. If we don't get this right now, we'll never get get it right for the youngest of us and that's what we need to do. So this is the first of three podcasts on early childhood education and childcare. We covered a lot of big picture here will drill down in the next one on formal and informal pre pre K education and learning opportunity. So hopefully lessons will stay with us. Thanks for the time you gave us for this podcast and tune in again.