Project Spotlight: Sharing Data for Systems Change in Childcare
Written by Jessica Gibbons
Elevate has been a partner in the efforts to stabilize nonprofit childcare centers, work that was lead by United Way of Greater Nashville with financial support from Metro Council and is now being led by the Nashville Early Education Coalition. Since the very beginning of this effort, a core goal has been collecting and sharing data to understand the true cost of high quality childcare and the financial shortfalls that nonprofit centers face as they prioritize making childcare affordable for all families.
Implementation In the Real World Requires Iterations
We knew we needed to start by having honest conversations with Center Directors to understand what specific pieces of information would be needed from each center to answer our key questions. We went through multiple iterations of conversations with a small number of childcare center directors, designing and re-designing the data collection forms that we would utilize. The perspective of the directors was invaluable in understanding their context and what data would be meaningful to track over time to understand the gaps for families and for centers - afterall, they are the experts! Once we had a form and a process that we and the directors felt good about, we hosted training sessions with all the center directors in the cohort to walk them through the process and resources we created.
And yet, even with the expert input of center directors, when we rolled out the data collection process to all the centers that were participating in the Childcare Stabilization work, we immediately ran into multiple issues. While we knew that centers were all in different places, we underestimated the great variability across the Centers in the types of software they had access and permission to use, their internal capacity (time and know-how) to complete the report each month, and their existing practices for managing student level data. We made changes to the forms as we learned what was unnecessarily burdensome, and United Way staff ramped up the time they dedicated to providing technical assistance and troubleshooting to the centers. In the second iteration of this work, NEEC made further changes to the reporting form to dramatically reduce the time it took centers to complete each month while retaining the critical pieces of information that shed light on the state of nonprofit childcare in the city.
The Power of Seeing the System
Although the road to collecting and sharing data from each of the nonprofit centers was a bumpy one, the collective learning has had a tremendous impact on the individual centers and the city-wide discussion of childcare. Throughout 2025, NEEC has convened the directors of these Centers to share their data back, creating greater clarity on what competitive teacher pay and tuition rates are within the group, understanding the number of spots for low income families in the system, and overall capacity at each center.
Elevate also authored the Sustaining Childcare for Nashville's Low-Income Families: A Call for Public Investment white paper, published by NEEC and United Way of Greater Nashville, which has focused the public discussion around the challenges faced by mission driven childcare centers. In the context of the recently announced cuts to the Smart Steps program, NEEC, childcare center directors, and city leaders are able to ground themselves in recent, local data to understand the impacts on the availability of seats for low income families and align resources to fill those gaps.
Shared Data Collection is Hard, and Worth It
Sharing data about an organization’s programming and financial model can be very uncomfortable. When organizations set out to work together on a city wide issue, they need to be willing and able to work with that discomfort and share data so that they can all see the bigger picture together. Otherwise, leaders will utilize whatever data they have access to in their silo and choose a direction based on that limited picture. When we work together to share data about the on-the-ground, real time realities in our community, leaders are able to see more clearly opportunities for alignment in the short term, and opportunities to reimagine the whole system together in the long term. We are really proud of each of the center directors who went through this process with us, pushing through the challenges of defining and submitting data in a standardized way, and engaging in critical conversations about what we found. Nashville is in a stronger position to think creatively about the childcare crisis because of the hours we collectively put in on this project.
