Nov. 28, 2025
By Judith Ruiz-Branch and Rebecca Gale for Better Life Lab at New America and The 74.
Corrine Hendrickson isn’t new to advocacy — as a longtime family child care provider in Wisconsin, she’s been fighting for children and families for more than a decade.
Over the years, she’s lobbied her state legislature to secure funding to support children with disabilities and worked with local officials to navigate grants. When COVID-19 hit, she co-founded the Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Network (WECAN), an advocacy organization focused on increasing public investment in early childhood that grew to include 2,000 child care providers, educators and parents in Wisconsin.
During COVID, she relied on funds from the American Rescue Plan to keep her doors open, but when those dollars finally dried up for good this past summer, the economics of running a family child care center in rural Wisconsin no longer worked. After 18 years in business, she closed up shop on Aug. 29, 2025.
Four days later, she filed to run for state senate.
She’s not alone. A number of child care providers have become involved with advocacy efforts, whether working with statehouses to add money for child care to state budgets or collaborating with local governments to coordinate distribution of funds — and some of them have gained the skills, confidence and passion to run for office.
Buoyed by her work organizing providers to take action on child care, Hendrickson said she feels prepared to explain how and why allocations from the state budget affect providers’ livelihood, and why child care plays a critical role in her state’s rural economy. When she goes out into the community to talk with people, from firefighters to farmers, they consistently bring up child care as one of the barriers they face. “It’s coming up organically,” said Hendrickson. “Which is telling me it’s really an issue.”
For BriTanya Brown, owner of a family child care program in Texas, it was organizing two successful ballot measures on child care in her state that motivated her to seek office. The first was a statewide property tax measure designed to offer child care providers a break by waiving property taxes and the second was a tax measure in Travis County, Texas to leverage property taxes to make child care more affordable for residents.
Brown, who began working in child care when she was 13 years old alongside both of her grandmothers who cared for neighborhood children, opened her own program in 2019 after her twins were born. That same year, she began organizing family child care providers to send in stakeholder comments and lobby state legislators on reimbursement rates. “We do the same work as centers and abide by the same rules. We wanted pay parity,” she explained.
Then, in 2021, Brown created and organized a Day Without Child Care, an event which has since become the largest one-day work stoppage in child care organizing history.
Over the past few years, Brown said she hit a number of roadblocks including licensing obstacles and financial challenges with subsidies. She ultimately had to close down her family child care in July of 2025.
“It was devastating,” Brown said, “but that loss became the catalyst for my advocacy. I had seen, up close, how fragile our care infrastructure truly is.”
In August, when Rep. Stan Lambert announced his retirement after serving four terms in the Texas Statehouse, Brown jumped at the chance to throw her hat in the ring. “I’m a new face, but I’m a trusted face in my community so I think I really have a chance,” she said.
Child care issues gained political momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the U.S. got a crash course on the importance of child care to its economy, and the sector continued to garner public interest through the 2024 presidential race. An analysis by New America found that by 2025, mentions of child care in the media are twice as high, on average, than they were before COVID, with a spike during the 2024 election. As the child care crisis continues to be part of the news cycle and political discourse, “it’s not surprising that the groups would recruit and support people who have a distinct expertise in this area, and would bring a unique and important perspective to the table,” said Kelly Dittmar, the director of research and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics.
Erin Vilardi, CEO of Vote Run Lead, a nonprofit that recruits and trains women on the campaign trail, said issues surrounding child care are often an impetus for candidates to run. “Half of the women who come through our program are parents,” she said. “The child care debate is one of the top three things we are talking about.”
Brown and Hendrickson aren’t alone in leveraging their child care backgrounds to run for office. Shaolin Brown operates a registered family child care program from her home and is running this November against a longtime incumbent for Mercer County Clerk in New Jersey, hoping to address child care capacity limits and licensing requirements, which she said can help families know which providers are meeting state safety guidelines.
And a number of existing public servants have paved the way for these candidates by successfully drawing from their experiences working in early care and education to become legislators. Sen. Patty Murray, worked as a preschool teacher for seven years before becoming a state senator and then a U.S. senator. Alabama Sen. Kirk Hatcher is the director of a Head Start program; Aletheia McCaskill, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates runs a family child care program and has been a licensed family child care provider since 1998; and Rebecca Dow, a member of the New Mexico House of Representatives, founded a child care center, where she worked for ten years before retiring in 2019.
Both Hendrickson and BriTanya Brown said the unique insights they’ve gained into families with young children have helped shape their platforms, and the communities they’ve developed through their child care work have been crucial as they run for office.
“I now have a huge group of people to support me. Most can’t donate, but they can make calls,” Hendrickson said. “This helps me be more inclined to do it. It’s not as scary when you know the people who have your back.”
Hendrickson said the power of her personal story of hardship resonates with voters, regardless of political affiliation. She speaks openly of a time when she had young children at home and her husband lost his job. “We had to rely on food stamps and BadgerCare,” she said, referring to Wisconsin’s state health insurance for low-income families. It was her family child care program that kept her family afloat, and it was also what brought her to advocating for change.
“People feel ashamed because of the way the system is set up — they feel like failures. But the system has been created so that it doesn’t work for us and it exploits women and young children,” Hendrickson said.
Running for office, she added, is “part of my journey of being a family child care professional.”
Rebecca Gale wrote this story for Better Life Lab at New America and The 74.
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