Data

Reimagining a child care system that works well for everybody starts with listening more keenly to those who the system is supposed to serve: the families, educators and administrators who are most responsible for meeting the needs of young children. The data driving this initiative highlights the pain points these experts are currently navigating and describes their ideal system.

Our Proximity Experts

Proximity Experts is a term we generated to describe the families, early childhood educators, and administrators who provide the data and expertise to guide the direction of this initiative. These experts have specialized knowledge and lived experiences with the child care system. We are committed to making their ideal real.  

Proximity experts continue to:

  1. Identify pain points in their current child care journey 
  2. Define components of their ideal child care journey 

Meet a few of our proximity experts:

Data From Proximity Experts (Fall 2021 – Fall 2022, Washington, D.C.)

We launched WeVision EarlyEd with data from 35 families, educators, and administrators (drawn from a pool of 170 applicants) to re-envision child care in D.C. A human-centered design consultant worked with the proximity experts for five months to map their “journeys” — both their current experience with the child care system and their ideal experience. 

Then, we identified the Core Shifts in public thinking needed to make ideal child care experiences a reality while also working with a subset of experts to identify the practical solutions we wanted to test first, based on ideas generated by the proximity experts.

three-column flow chart describing WeVision EarlyEd's process. starts in fall 2021 where proximity experts were engaged, moves to fall 2021 to springs 2022 where they mapped current and ideal child care experiences, ends with summer to fall 2022 where they identified solutions and met with stakeholders

Data From Proximity Experts (Fall 2022 – Present, National) 

Building on the data from Washington, D.C., we sought other opportunities to collect data from proximity experts from other states. We also collected data from more than 2,000 early childhood professionals using an interactive WeVision EarlyEd conference exhibit. We continue to host briefings and facilitate sessions. The child care pain points are similar, and so is the ideal.  That’s why WeVision EarlyEd is about making the ideal real, in D.C. and beyond.

The Interactive WeVision EarlyEd Conference Exhibit: