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 Experts
In order to learn more about the pain points in the existing child care system — and to envision the ideal system — WeVision EarlyEd brought together 35 experts: families, educators and administrators who know Washington, D.C.’s child care system well. Meet a few of our experts:
Our Process
Once we had assembled our experts, WeVision EarlyEd began a year-long process to understand their current pain points and their vision for a better, ideal child care system. Our process included:
Step 1: Recruit experts
We engaged 35 individuals (drawn from a pool of 170 applicants) to re-envision child care in D.C. We refer to these families, educators and administrators as “proximity experts” to acknowledge their first-hand experience and expertise, and we compensated them accordingly.
Step 2: Map their current and ideal experiences
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 what their ideal experience would look like.
Step 3: Identify core shifts and potential solutions
As part of this process, we identified the Core Shifts in public thinking needed to make ideal child care experiences a reality. We also worked with a subset of experts to identify the practical solutions we wanted to test first, based on ideas generated by the proximity experts.