The BUILD Initiative is Core Partner in the New National Early Care and Education Workforce Center
The National Early Care and Education (ECE) Workforce Center, created by the Administration for Children and Families, is a collaborative staffed by six core partners: the BUILD Initiative, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley, Child Trends, DE Institute for Excellence in Early Childhood at UDel, Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation at UMass Boston, and ZERO TO THREE. With a $30 million award over five years, the National ECE Workforce Center will coordinate and provide technical assistance and rigorous research to advance the recruitment and retainment of a diverse, qualified, and effective ECE workforce.
The BUILD Initiative will lead universal, targeted, and intensive technical assistance efforts with ZERO TO THREE, and many additional partners, through the team’s Learning through Action Consortium: All Our Kin, Child Care Services Association, EDvance, National Association for Family Child Care, Early Care & Education Pathways to Success, Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies, Start Early, National Workforce Registry Alliance, and the Donahue Institute. The focus and goals of the ECE Workforce Center are designed to examine and address the need for fundamental changes to recruitment, retention, career advancement, compensation, and ECE workplace policies.
The early care and education workforce – primarily women and often women of color and immigrants – has historically been undervalued and underpaid in the US education system. Their knowledge, skills, and well-being are undervalued because of longstanding racial and gender inequities. Exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the child care sector has lost almost 80,000 jobs, or about 7.5 percent of its workforce since early 2020.
The National ECE Workforce Center’s focus and goals are designed to examine and address the need for fundamental changes to career advancement systems, compensation, and ECE workplace policies. The partners aim to support leaders to advance change that centers early educators’ expertise and leadership across the full range of ECE settings (including family child care homes across Head Start, Child Care and Development Fund, state-funded preschool, and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and ECE systems (federal, state, local, and in tribes and territories).
Tonya Coston, BUILD’s new ECE Workforce Center Co-Director, stated, “I’m thrilled to be able to bring my experience and commitment to the National ECE Workforce Center to partner with other state and community leaders, educators, and families to promote thriving children and families.”
Since 2002, the BUILD Initiative has partnered with state leaders to create policies, infrastructure, and connections across agencies and organizations to advance comprehensive, high-quality, and equitable programs, services, and supports for young children, their families, and communities. BUILD helps leaders think and act systemically to address disparities and expand their networks to enhance their capacity to take action.
Read more National ECE Workforce Center here. Stay tuned for more information from the Center in the coming months!
Explore More

Workforce Compensation
Report August 29, 2023
A robust early childhood care and education workforce is at the heart of any solution to stabilize the child care sector, and adequate compensation is pivotal to that end. That reality comes through in the PDG B-5 grant applications; many states demonstrate a keen focus on supporting workforce compensation. This brief explores and synthesizes the strategies to increase compensation that states proposed in their PDG B-5 grant applications.

Supporting Multilingual Learners
Report August 17, 2023
As the number of young multilingual learners— children who speak language(s) other than English—increases throughout the country, the focus on supporting language development, rooted in diverse cultural, linguistic, and developmentally appropriate practices, becomes a critical component of the early childhood care and education (ECCE) system.

Systems Building through Governance Processes
Report August 10, 2023
Twenty-one states are drawing on the Preschool Development Birth through Five Renewal Grant (PDG B-5 Renewal) to advance their early childhood care and education (ECCE) systems. These states are undertaking a rich and broad variety of work with this infusion of resources. The BUILD Initiative, ZERO TO THREE, and Start Early, all of whom are members of the National TA Collaborative to Maximize Federal Early Childhood Investments, collaborated on these briefs to share critical early childhood issues that states and their partners are addressing by using the information available in the PDG B-5 Renewal applications. These grants not only provide immediate benefits and long-term systems implications for the states and their communities; they also shed light on the state of the field, which we attempt to outline through this set of briefs.