10/07/2026
Imagine you’re an architect gearing up for your next project, ready to bring your vision to life. But instead of laying out a house, you’re designing Santa Clara County’s child care ecosystem, where every kid and family has access to what they need.
That’s exactly what we did with our Child Care Blueprint. Led by the Office of Children and Families Policy (which I helped create) and my direction, the blueprint offers a comprehensive framework for leaders to address the child care crisis countywide. It analyzes existing infrastructure (in this metaphor, the original build site), the workforce (the foundation), barriers to access (the red tape), families’ needs (the house itself), and real solutions (the roof, to top it all off).
Let’s start with the barriers we are facing. Our county has approximately 93,805 children between ages 0 and 5, according to 2025 U.S. Census data. Most of those children, along with many older kids, need some form of child care, but we’re only meeting 69% of that need, with a 25,072-slot shortage, according to 2023 data. Most of that gap is for infants and toddlers, with about 19,448 missing slots. In fact, we’re only meeting 28% of the need for children younger than 3. That’s thousands of children likely not receiving critical developmental support and thousands of families forced to forgo work to care for their kids. And let me be clear: we should all care about this, regardless of if you’re a parent. This crisis has a calamitous domino effect on our local economy and children’s future as they become adults that cannot be understated, but I digress.
The blueprint transcends the data to the real-life impact of this crisis by including 95 families’ varied experiences. Read more about the blueprint in my latest blog post here: https://bit.ly/4hzTM8f
Thanks to FIRST 5 Santa Clara County, Grail Family Services, the Office of Children and Families Policy, Santa Clara County Office of Education, and so many more who made this project happen.
