Economic Outlook Symposium Lunch with the Fed Experts II

THOMAS WALSTRUM: OK, it's time for the next session, which is called Lunch with Chicago Fed Experts. And so we've got two of them for you today, which is great. And we have so many great people at the bank who do really great research. And it's a wealth of options for me. And I'm still quite happy with the people I picked, and I'm also happy that they said yes.

So we're going to start with Susan. Susan is a policy advisor here at the bank in our community and economic development division. And this group, it's a really interesting group. They have a special-- I'm going to call it a special mandate. We have all kinds of mandates. The Fed, this is a special mandate from Congress through the Community Reinvestment Act to focus on understanding the needs of low and moderate income communities.

And so one of the things that this group spearheaded-- and we joined them a little bit as well and helping out in the regional group and in other parts of the research department. One of the things this group did primarily this year is they did a special initiative called the Spotlight on Child Care in the Labor Market. And Susan's going to tell you all about. Susan was kind of the-- I don't know what title you'd want to give yourself Susan for-- air traffic controller for this project. I like that.

And actually, as part of this initiative, I've advertised for our survey, the CFSEC, we actually did ask roundtable and CFSEC participants about their views on how child care is affecting them and their organization's operations. So we did that and wrote up an article on that. Susan and I did and colleague Martin.

But we did a ton of other things. I think-- how many articles? 20, 25 articles that were written and events as well. It's really an amazing amount of work that was done. And so I'm here to-- this project is kind of wrapping up, and I'm delighted to have Susan come here and talk and share with you the key takeaways that we got out of this initiative. And so with that, why don't you come up, Susan?

SUSAN LONGWORTH: All right. Thank you, Tom, and thank you to all of you who are sticking around through lunch. I hope that's going well. I'm Susan Longworth, as he said. I'm a policy advisor here in community development at the Federal Reserve. And I am going to move off of this picture that you see and start to move us forward.

I'm going to be doing a presentation that's an overview of some of the work we've been doing exactly on what you see here, child care in the labor market and sharing some of the things that we have learned. Not a good Fed presentation until I throw out a couple disclaimers. You're lucky. A while ago, I did a presentation up in Green Bay and I had four disclaimers. This time you only get two.

The first one is the standard one is that the views expressed here are not necessarily the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve System. So we should all know that by now. The other one is more related to this specific presentation in that I have the honor, but also the daunting task of presenting the work of many of my colleagues.

In fact, most of what I'm going to share with you is not my work at all. And so, as Tom alluded to, there were more than two dozen folks across community development, but also across research who contributed in some way through research, through policy work, through other outreach, and just good thinking to this effort. And so I have the responsibility, the honor, and it's something I'm approaching with a fair degree of humility, to try and present their work. And at the end, I will welcome your softball questions if you could. So I'll do my best.

So first of all, as we get started, very quickly, I'm going to run through some framing slides. First of all, what is the spotlight on childcare and the labor market? That sentence you see in front of you, it's a targeted effort to understand ways in which the lack of access to childcare is a barrier to employment in the seventh district. That's from our web page. And if you go to chicagofed.org, you can see all the work that we've done on this topic is there and I invite you to explore that.

I'm going to draw a line under a couple pieces of this sort of simple sentence. One of those pieces is barrier to employment. Obviously, childcare is a huge topic. There are many different facets and there are certainly folks who've devoted their entire careers to understanding the importance of childcare, to understanding the importance of early childhood education. For us, we took a focused approach and we focused this on child care that is necessary for parents and caregivers to get to work. And that was really where we focused our learnings.

The other word I'll highlight here is targeted. We also recognize and we heard from many folks such as you that there's a huge spectrum of need for care across our economy, really expanding across the life cycle. For the purposes of this effort, we focused on those early years, that 0 to 3, maybe 0 to 4, where there really is no great public solution and parents and caregivers are left really to their own devices to figure out how they're going to navigate care for their youngest children.

The other part to go over, and probably maybe it's in some of your minds, is why is the Fed interested in child care? Many of us are parents. I saw the show of hands earlier. But there are other reasons beyond that. And there are really two core reasons why we focused in on this topic.

One, as many of you know because you participated in these conversations, is that we are constantly reaching out to industry leaders, business owners, and leaders of nonprofit organizations, community leaders, to understand how folks around our district are experiencing the economy. And these discussions are a primary source of information and real time data about how our communities are experiencing economic conditions. You heard it earlier from Austin. I also participate in these conversations. I can honestly say it's one of the most important and certainly one of the most rewarding aspects of my job is to hear how people are doing, how people are doing for their economic goals and financial goals.

In any case, through these conversations, the challenges around accessing child care have been a hot button issue for a long time and in these conversations with our business and community contacts. And that was certainly a motivator for us in taking on this work. It's also a motivator, I think, for the invitation that I received to share this back with you.

We love being able to hear from people, do some thinking, and then share all of that back. This is what we learned. Did we get it right? What surprises you? What else would you like to know? This constant sort of wheel of inquiry that we're on. And so child care being the example that I'm going to present to you today.

So if you remember one thing from this is if you ask why is the Chicago Fed interested in child care, it's because you told us we should be. That's a pretty simple way of putting it.

The other aspect of this is that, as Austin mentioned, we have a dual mandate here, and there's two parts to a dual mandate. One is to maintain price stability and the other one is to maintain maximum employment. In this case, specifically, child care has been cited as a barrier to working and hiring, and also as a barrier to a factor in how people engage with the labor force, how many hours they're able to work, whether they're able to work part time or full time.

All of these nuances come into these decisions on the part of parents. And so anything that affects that maximum employment mandate is something we have a vested interest in understanding a little bit more about. We're going to lean into that and say how exactly is that affecting our ability to meet that aspect of our mandate.

So I've said a few words about what this is. I'm going to say just one sentence about what this isn't. It was never our intention to solve this problem. We never showed up and said, we're from the Fed. We're going to solve child care. It was an intent to listen, to learn, to share, hopefully literally shed a spotlight on the topic. Sometimes it's helpful if the Fed can put a bright light on something. But it was really an effort to collectively understand how this issue was affecting our district.

So touching quickly on what we've learned. None of this is going to surprise you. I don't think there are going to be any big moments throughout my presentation. In fact, when I present this work to a more sort of child care focused audience, I often call these affirmations. That when they see these things, they nod their heads and they say, yeah, that aligns with my experience. That's something that makes sense to me.

So I'm going to tick through these, and then these four themes are going to frame some of the data and other things I share going forward over the next few slides. So thing one is that caring for young children impacts working and hiring. No surprise here. We've been hearing this from employers. We've been hearing it from community groups that work in placing people. But it's a bit complicated and there are nuances to this. And so we'll get into some of that around the data I'll be sharing.

The next one is that finding childcare at the right time and the right places at an affordable price is an ongoing challenge for working parents. And we'll see how that shows up. There are a couple aspects to that that are kind of unique to our seventh district Midwestern footprint. One of those is how this shows up for shift workers and folks with irregular, unusual schedules. The other one is, as you know, we have vast rural geographies. And so access and accessing child care across larger spaces is often a challenge for many families.

The next one is the child care supplies impacted by the conditions of the child care workforce. This is consistently mentioned. The challenges of the childcare business model is also consistently mentioned. And I'll dig into some data that really shows who the child care workforce is and what the conditions are that they're working under.

And finally, because we don't have a national child care policy, policy responses and practice responses are often quite fragmented and show up at the state and community levels. And it was really wonderful to hear about so many innovative and exciting things that were happening across our communities as part of our outreach around this topic. And so I'll look forward to just touching on just a few of those.

So we're going to get into some of the data. I'm not an economist. And again, this is not my work, but I'm going to do my best. And so hopefully and give you some big takeaways from these numbers.

So first of all, some context around this. There are about 60 million adults in the United States between the ages of 25 and 54, so those prime working age years, with at least one child under 18 at home. And roughly 80% of these parents are also in the labor force. So either employed or actively seeking employment. And they represent about 30% of the total US labor force.

So the takeaway from that is that most parents are working, are in the labor force. This is an issue that they experience on a daily basis. And they are also an important part of the labor force. So if our parents are struggling, that has implications throughout the working population.

So actually this first slide looks at people outside of the labor force. So they are either not working and not looking for work. It reflects work done by my colleagues, Mark O'Dell and Brianna Smith. And it shows that the share of parents reporting child care is the main reason for not seeking work has increased through the pandemic.

And you see these in these bars here. The blue bars are the pre-pandemic, red bar is peak pandemic, and green bar is post-pandemic. And specifically, I'll point your attention to the second grouping there, which are mothers with children under five at home. And so you can see that that weighs heavily on them.

This pattern also holds true for parents when they're asked about the main reason for missing work and also the main reason why they are only working part time but would like full time work is that childcare is a barrier to them being able to address that issue.

So all of this, and this is something we'll look a little bit more at in the next slide, child care problems have a relatively large impact on employed parents' ability to choose full time work rather than part time work, as well as for working parents who cite childcare as a reason they have missed work. And so it's interesting to think about the magnitude of this issue.

And our authors found that without child care problems, total hours worked by parents could increase by about 1% and almost 4% for mothers of young children. And that 80% of that increase would result if you could solve this part time, full time tension and could address issues around having to miss work because of child care. So when we think about some of the earlier conversations we've had today around flexibility, around accommodations, that kind of starts to come into focus and starts to sound real.

So let's look now at folks in the labor force and specifically women in the labor force. And so these two slides, again, get to that first theme of caring for young children impacts working and hiring. And specifically, one thing we can note here is that the labor force participation for women is higher than it was prior to the pandemic.

And most strikingly, it's young women with young children. It's women with young children at home, that is, those most in need of childcare, who have experienced the largest increases in labor force participation. And among these women with young children, college educated women are the ones increasing their labor force participation the most. And so, of course, work from home trends and some of the flexibility we've been hearing about may play a role in this increase in labor force participation.

In addition to increases in labor force participation, we are also seeing an increase in the number of hours worked amongst young women with young kids. And so this leaves us with some sort of outstanding questions and how is this working. How are these women who have young children at home, how are they able to not only increase labor force participation, but also increase the number of hours they're working?

And so a possible few solutions are is it hybrid work? Is it all of these changes that have come since the pandemic? Is this sort of giving folks this flexibility? We don't really have the data to dig into that, but that's an outstanding question. Is it increased child care coming from men and grandparents or other relatives? And we'll see some of this in subsequent slides. So are there other sources of support? Or is this simply putting a lot of increased pressure on existing childcare resources? Which would be interesting, given that the 0 to 4 population is declining. So what is the dynamic between those two factors? And the answer is we don't quite know. But the data is certainly pointing us in some interesting directions.

One of those directions we head off in is that these questions of how and where parents are accessing child care brings us to our second theme. And that is that finding child care at the right time and the right places at an affordable price is an ongoing challenge for working parents. Again, there's no big aha moments. We're all having moments of just remembering those days when this was a daily challenge.

So this slide, very straightforward here, highlights that child care facilities or care for relatives are the two most common sources, the two most common places that parents turn to when they need child care. So child care facilities being a daycare center, relatives being your grandparents or another person that is in your family.

As in many things, the details, the devil is in the fine print here. And so one thing that I would call out for you is that if you're doing the math here in between your bites of sandwiches, you'll see these bars don't add up to 100%. And that is because 28% of households use more than one type of child care during any given week.

And certainly when I was a parent of young children, we used three types and that worked for us. That was fine. So I want to be clear that there is no judgment in this. There is no right or wrong way to solve this problem. It's simply that often it takes multiple sources of child care for parents to work things out.

The other thing that I would point is the bar here on the far right, which is that category of none is at 19%. So almost 1 in 5, 20% of folks say that at some point during the week, they have no child care.

So let's dig into these numbers a little bit more. And so this is child care sources by household income. And it obviously varies depending on where you are on the income spectrum. And so the lowest incomes, those are families with incomes under 50,000. Those are the blue bars. And the higher incomes are the gray and orange bars if you want to look across those.

The key takeaways that I would leave you with is that the households with the lowest incomes have the highest shares of none and relative care and low shares of non-relative, that would probably be nannies and other paid sources of care, and facility based care, which again, are the daycare centers. In addition, the lowest income category is the only group with non-trivial Head Start participation, which makes sense, because that is an income targeted program.

So the thing that struck me about this, like I said, I'm not an economist. I was an English major, so you can feel my pain right now. But when I look at this data, I think about the people behind these numbers. And so low income families, as you see here, are relying on what are often free sources of care, a relative, or none. So none, I would point out, for the lowest income are 38% of respondents said that at some point during the week they had no child care, compared to 8% for those of folks in the higher income brackets.

And within relative care, which here is at 29% for families with incomes lower than 50,000, we often think of this as being grandparents. But I would also recall, this is something that's been brought forward to me in terms of conversations with child care professionals, these can also be siblings. And so both of those cases, I always consider the impact of providing unpaid child care on the working and learning goals of these family members and what that means. So I just leave that as a thought.

We've talked about paid care. And here we're getting into-- this is a bit of a complicated slide. There's a lot going on. The table at the top provides some detail into the share of folks who are not paying for child care. And again, this is for the seventh district. But for most of these slides, for all of these slides, the distribution across the country is much the same. So if we were to pull in from other states, you would see similar trends.

And so you see overall 41% of respondents. And here this is the Household Pulse Survey. And so the respondent is a working female with only one child, 0 to 4 at home using one type of child care in the prior week. And overall, they say that 41% of respondents said they don't pay for child care. And so that, again, sort of gives you a thought about how do you do that. How does that work?

Head Start, obviously makes sense as a significant source, is a resource where parents who are not paying for child care often avail themselves of Head Start. But again, I'll point to that next line, which is relative care and that 81% of folks who say they use relative care say they also don't pay for it. And so again, that's an important source of care. But it's also you think about the other dynamics on the person providing that care.

If you look at the folks who are paying for child care, the average weekly cost in the seventh district is $267. And before we get too excited about what a great deal that is, because the US average is 325 and in Chicago we're looking at almost $400, any way you slice and dice it, you're talking about $15,000 to $20,000 a year for child care.

And so that's a significant burden. It certainly makes sense that the amount paid increases as a household income goes up. But we also need to keep in mind that these are young parents. They're often at the early stages of their earning careers. And so this can be a significant portion of their household budget.

One thing I haven't said a lot about at this point is the aspect of this theme of finding child care in the right time and the right place at an affordable price. I haven't gotten into the part of finding child care in the right places much. Some colleagues, Dan Hartley, Tori Healy, Bhash Mazumder, and Jung Sakong looked at geolocation data, which uses anonymized cell phone tracking to assess distance traveled to childcare centers.

It's pretty complex stuff. It's super interesting. But it's exactly the kind of thing where I would get out of my depth pretty quickly. But if you're interested in learning more, we're happy to make that connection. It also points to the importance of identifying new data sources to help us parse apart the supply and demand complex questions that surface around child care.

So it's pretty clear from looking at the costs of child care and having this description of how parents are piecing things together for themselves that parents are pretty tapped out on affordability. However, the condition of child care businesses, and these are businesses, these are small businesses. And I'll describe some of those characteristics in a moment. Their conditions are pretty precarious.

And in talking to providers, and we've also done a little work on this as well, most of these businesses operate sort of on a really, really narrow margin. So 1% or less. So one family leaving is going to tip them one way or the other. A new regulation is going to tip them one way or the other. And as with many small businesses, salaries are the largest budget item. And so this tends to have a significant impact on the wages of child care workers.

So we're going to spend the next few slides exploring our third theme, which is the child care supply is impacted by the condition of the child care workforce. And so we're really looking at understanding the paid child care workforce. Here we thought a little bit about unpaid, and now we're going to talk about paid.

So this slide shows the overall condition of the child care workforce. And the headline here is that child care employment is still 9% below pre-pandemic levels and has simply not recovered in the way the rest of the workforce has. So that orange line is all workers. The blue line is child care workers. Immediately at the onset of the pandemic, the child care workforce fell to about 70%. So there was a huge dip. And it simply hasn't recovered in the same way that other industries have. And so when we think about those earlier slides of mothers working more and working more hours, we sort of have to ask ourselves again, how is this all adding up?

So let's think about who the childcare workers are and where they work. And so, again, all workers here are the orange bars. Child care workers are the blue bars. They are overwhelmingly female, more likely to be Hispanic, more likely to be Black, and also have lower levels of educational attainment.

And when we think about where they do work, and that's not on this slide, the vast majority of child care workers work in small establishments. There's about 80,000 child daycare establishments across the country, and 84% of workers work at establishments with fewer than 50 employees. And that's compared to about 44% of workers who work at establishments that small across the economy as a whole.

And so I know there are folks here who work with small businesses, and you can easily think about the challenges that that creates for not only workers, but also the owners of those businesses. Owners of those businesses are also often themselves female. And certainly we hear a lot about how small businesses should be wealth creators and asset builders. And you think about how you're actually going to be able to do that working under such constraints.

One of the ways in which these constraints really show up is when we talk about child care workers. I think we all as parents, if you had your kids in a daycare center, you remember that one worker who was so important to your child. We had Miss Coco. And Miss Coco gave out the best hugs, but she also was a teacher. And I don't know what we would have done if she'd left. We would have survived, but there's this moment of tailspin.

And so when you think about the importance of these workers to early childhood education, to the development of our next generation of workers, and then you look at the wages here, it's quite striking that child care workers, their wages are on par with cashiers, with waitstaff, with housekeepers, with retail sales persons, and certainly much lower than the median wages across all occupations.

The other narrative that has been pervasive over the years sort of through and post-pandemic is that low wage workers have seen increases in their wages. And certainly that has been true, but to varying degrees. And so this chart breaks this down for us a little bit on the far right. The wait staff have seen increases of a little bit over 17%. Child care workers have not seen those same benefits. They've seen their wages increase by 5.5%.

I like to put this stuff in real terms. And so if you correspond that to an inflation adjusted wage, that comes out to an increase of $0.76 an hour. And certainly while it may be higher than what we've seen across all occupations, that remains a significant challenge when you think about the conditions of child care workers.

And so not surprisingly, it's a sector that sees a great deal of turnover. If you stacked these bars and added them all up, they would come up to about between 12% and 13%. Trust me, I did it. That was the extent of my math skills on this. And that's the level of turnover that you see in this sector every month. About 13% of child care workers leave the occupation each month.

This is on par with what you would see across low wage workers. There's this churn of people going for an extra quarter or maybe they're able to work closer to home and save on gas, as we heard earlier from Megan, or something like that. So that's typical.

There's a couple of things that stand out to me in this chart here. One is that the middle bar, the green bar, is those child care workers who exit the labor force. Some of these are folks who perhaps have small children themselves and just decide it makes more sense to care for them at home, and they do that. But that's concerning is to see that segment of workers, and again, it's sort of an essential high value role exit the labor force altogether.

The red bar is folks who stay and transition to another employment, another job. We would like to think that perhaps they move along and move up the educational career pathway. They move to better jobs. And in that regard, actually about 1/4 of them do that. The most folks who leave the child care sector transition to other low wage jobs.

So I'm moving to our final theme, and that is that policy responses are fragmented and solutions emerge at the local and community level. And these are all pieces that appear in our childcare and the labor force, labor market spotlight web page. So if you want to learn more, dig in and learn more about this stuff, it's all there.

A couple of things that I'll call your attention to is work, again, around this dynamic of shift workers, including looking at a pilot program for women in the trades coming out of Milwaukee. We also had an interesting interview with a leader of a CDFI that's doing work around financing childcare facilities. And he was quick to remind us that this is something they've been doing for three decades. So this is not a new topic. So there's a lot of knowledge there about how to do this. I didn't talk much about facilities, but it's certainly part of this dynamic of where this work happens is also equally important to how and the who and all of this.

We also did some case study profiles of Iowa communities, the Cedar Valley, which is a community level collaboration between a hospital, local philanthropy, and a child care network, and how they're going to be able to add more than 100 spots for child care to that community. I had the honor of attending their groundbreaking in 97 degree heat back in August.

I ran into one of their leaders just this past week in DC, and she told me that they're at the drywall stage. They're picking out paint and furniture and all the fun stuff that goes with the little tables and everything like that. So it's nice to know that by summer they're going to be able to bring that resource to their communities.

And then we also did a session back in July, the Fed Listens, where many of the folks who have helped us inform these pieces, we brought them together and had them talk about their work and talk amongst themselves. And it was just a really powerful opportunity to let people who do this every day, who are the experts, talk about what they need and what they're learning and what their outlook is. So that's online still, and if you're interested in looking at that.

So our key takeaways here. Again, no huge surprises, but just things I want to put a finer point on. Many report child care access as a potential barrier to working. And we have these outstanding questions about female labor force participation, putting upward pressure on demand. And how is the sector able to respond to that? Exactly what is happening to absorb those additional workers and those additional hours?

The majority of families use childcare facilities and/or relatives for care. And this was obviously very dependent on family income levels. I will also call out just that also that other segment that cites none or also that isn't able to pay for care. And so what is the dynamic that gets introduced there?

The childcare labor market was hard hit during the pandemic and hasn't fully recovered. Child care is a labor intensive sector. There are no robots, there's no AI for child care. And so it's really hard to increase supply without more workers. And honestly, we don't want anybody cutting any corners when it comes to our youngest babies.

And child care wages have grown more slowly than for other low wage service sector jobs. Low wages leads to high transmission rates, as we saw out of the industry. And so one of the ongoing challenges is balancing affordability and sustainable wages for these workers. How exactly is that going to happen and what's it going to take?

And then finally, just stressing again that communities and states continue to innovate policy and practice solutions. We saw some of it. We didn't see all of them. But it's always exciting to hear about how communities are addressing this. One constant across all of the examples that we were able to come forward with is that in some way, the solutions were grounded in a need for economic growth. And so business owners were coming to the table, the industry was coming to the table, the chamber was coming to the table and saying, hey, if we want to meet our growth goals for our region, we need to solve this problem for the parents in our community who want to work.

So I will stop there. And I know Tom might have a couple questions if we have time. And I know they're the easy ones. So bring it on.

THOMAS WALSTRUM: Great. Thanks, Susan.

So I'm going to take one question actually that I'm going to answer, because I have a computer in front of me where I could look this up. It's is the labor force participation rate for women aged 25 to 54 the highest it has ever been? How does this current rate compare with the rate over the 20th century?

And the answer is yes. We are at the highest percentage rate right now at 78.2. And we've been up in the 70s since the late '80s. And then before that, the data goes back to 1948. In 1948, it was 33%. So it's steadily rising.

We're at 78.2% now. So I'm going to check that question off.

SUSAN LONGWORTH: Thank you. File that under what did you learn today.

THOMAS WALSTRUM: OK, great. So we've got a couple other upvoted ones. I'm going to pick the one that's most fun, which is-- or actually we've got a couple fun ones, but we'll go with the ones upvoted. In your analysis, did you hear any inspirational stories, specific examples of things working well? And then, well, and there's a follow up question, but let's start with that.

SUSAN LONGWORTH: Sure. That is the fun one. And so, yes, we did. And I think the exciting thing that came out of this was the collaborations that came together around this. Again, I mentioned the business community coming together, the chamber. I had the opportunity to present at an event up in Green Bay and it was led by the Green Bay chamber. This is something to which they're devoting a lot of resources.

It takes a lot. It literally takes a village. And so local philanthropy is at the table. The major employers are at the table. The community, the child care resource and referral networks are at the table. And so it's sort of everybody's in the pool and everybody is sort of aligned around that if we want to meet our economic goals, this is a piece that needs to be solved for it's a very complicated problem. And this is the piece of the thread that you need to pull on.

The one thing that I will mention that has been stressed to us over and over again is that this is a long road. And so for most communities, this is not a new issue. And again, I'll use the example of the community we spoke with in Cedar Valley, Iowa. So that's the Waterloo area.

This is a topic they've been working on, I think, since 2017, if not even earlier. And so there's a runway of more than five years, maybe 10 years to really figure this out. And so it is a long term commitment. And I think it's also, if I draw inspiration from that, I think it speaks to the tenacity of these communities to create the best sort of future and outcomes for themselves.

THOMAS WALSTRUM: Great. So I think I will ask the follow up. I guess, maybe if you want to share a favorite model of collaboration that came out of-- that you--

SUSAN LONGWORTH: I can't do that.

THOMAS WALSTRUM: OK. Fair enough.

SUSAN LONGWORTH: I mean, I think I would reiterate what I said, and I think it's also, I had the opportunity to go to this groundbreaking. And I'm picking on my friends in Waterloo and the Cedar Valley. And listen, the parents were there, the grandparents were there. They were out there. The toddlers had their little hard hats and their little shovels and everything like that. And so, again, it takes a full community commitment.

There's an enormous amount of pro bono support that comes from architects, obviously the community leadership. The mayor was there. This is something that transcends-- he said this is something that when he came into office was already underway. And so it transcends electoral cycles. So I think those are events, the examples that are really meaningful.

And I would say that's not an isolated example. So this occurs. We have another example on the website from Northeast Wisconsin, very similar with a manufacturer. So these similar characteristics of really broad and deep collaborations.

THOMAS WALSTRUM: OK. I think we've got time for one more. And I guess we'll make it another fun one. Let's see here. What most surprised you from doing this work?

SUSAN LONGWORTH: There were several things that surprised me. I think really understanding the conditions of the child care workforce. And one thing, if I had sort of my magic wand of what I would like to continue working on, it's really understanding that the child care business model. And these are small businesses and how they can work better for the workers and the owners. And so I think that was the part where I just hadn't thought about that a lot. And so learning about those different characteristics, some of the challenges.

There's also a lot of really, really interesting work going on around how to improve not only the wages. There's a lot of wage studies going on about how you can increase the salaries of these workers but also create viable career pathways. So this becomes a career of choice and it's something that folks can commit to in a sustainable way.

THOMAS WALSTRUM: All right, beautiful. All right. So, everyone, let's give Susan round of applause. Thanks.