Grant supports capacity for collaborative funding model

When Brian Schmidt, executive director of Kids Win Missouri, had two kids in childcare at the same time, “It was like we could barely make it,” he said. “We didn’t have fun for a couple years because you’re spending more than your mortgage on childcare.”

Research from the Kauffman Foundation finds that more than a third of Kansas City families with children cannot cover basic costs, even with a parent working full time.

Childcare is a wealth gap issue that restricts economic mobility. Schmidt said it’s an issue families – or employers – can’t wait for policy or public funding alone to solve.

In the fall of 2024, Kids Win Missouri was awarded a Capacity Building grant to fund a nine-month community-engaged strategic planning process for the development of a community childcare exchange. Kids Win Missouri and its partners enhanced their organizational expertise and capacity to develop and implement a model that was community informed, scalable, and sustainable.

“We had a concept, but we knew that we had a lot of work to do,” said Schmidt. “We were really interested in building something that was flexible enough where any community can take this infrastructure and technology and utilize it to address their childcare challenges.”

The work to take concept to reality found Schmidt and his associates in conversation with peer states to learn and study their models, as well as with families, stakeholders, and partners across the state. “They were all part of the solution building,” he said.

The concept turned into Missouri Child Care Works, administered by Child Care Aware of Missouri in partnership with Kids Win Missouri.

Child Care Works is a model in which stakeholders who understand the economic benefit of quality childcare access share the cost. It was developed with the flexibility to operate as a collaborative funding, sliding-scale, public-private model.

After studying what worked, and didn’t work, in peer states like Michigan and Iowa, and listening to stakeholders to understand their priorities, Schmidt and his associates believed it was advantageous to make Missouri’s model funding-source agnostic and to leverage technology to make use and administration as easy as possible for families, employers, and providers. They also wanted to focus on families whose income disqualifies them from traditional subsidies and to implement a sliding scale payment to support low-income families instead of the fixed shared cost of some tri-fund models.

“This is not how a lot of models work, but I think one of my goals was to try to give a bigger public benefit to families that have the greater need and have lower incomes,” Schmidt said. “We have a sliding scale model to really try to help families and their workforce participation and really help their economic mobility.”

Schmidt sees it as a win-win-win for families, employers, and providers. Access to quality childcare at reduced costs supports families’ ability to maintain employment and pursue career advancement. Offering this benefit provides employers an advantage in competitive labor markets, improved employee retention, and reduced absenteeism and increased productivity. Childcare providers benefit from stable, reliable funding streams, which improves the ability to maintain existing childcare slots and opportunities to expand services.

Stakeholders also benefit from one streamlined platform. Funding contributors from families to public entities work through a payment portal to make their deposits directly into the Child Care Works platform. It creates consistency for providers – something not every model in peer states has.

“The provider gets one payment, so they don’t have to go and collect all this money from all these different sources and keep track of it all,” Schmidt said.

Now, across Missouri, 19 communities are participating in Child Care Works, each with a lead organization who was connected to the community-informed strategic planning in Kansas City. By design, the platform is flexible enough to accommodate different approaches. For example, the 2025 state budget included funding for tri-share childcare programming for first responders in Missouri.

“They knew that we were working on a tri-share program,” Schmidt said. “They were looking at different administration options, and because we had already built the infrastructure and technology, it was much more economical to utilize the Child Care Works platform. So, we worked with the State Department of Education and the City of Kansas City and Childcare Aware of Missouri to make it happen.”

What seemed essential to Schmidt was building a model that accommodates the reality of a state’s political and economic environment. “If you have a one-size-fits-all solution, then it may not work for anybody, honestly, especially with something as complex as childcare and how it’s financed,” he said.

The Capacity Building grant allowed Kids Win to build out the concept with stakeholders, which not only catalyzed development of the model, but consumer readiness.

I think without the Capacity Building grant, we had a concept, we didn’t know how to operationalize it. It [the Capacity Building grant] gave us the resources and the tools to take this idea and really be able to put it into action, and in a way that communities had ownership and stakeholders across the state had ownership.

— Brian Schmidt
Executive Director, Kids Win Missouri

Operation of Child Care Works is funded with a $2.5 million appropriation in the Missouri state budget and supported by the Missouri Children’s Trust Fund. The goal is to have 150 children participating state-wide by the end of this year with their eyes set on about 450 in year two, and 1,000 in year three.

Word is spreading about Child Care Works and Missouri’s innovative model.

The Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska featured the Missouri Child Care Works model in its report, “From Pilot to Policy: Lessons Learned from Five Tri-Share Models.” A key lesson the report shares in evaluating the program in its early stages is optimistic: “Missouri – with its stated emphasis on working with providers, stabilizing funding, and even building capacity – may have a better shot at addressing childcare shortages, not just cost.”

The program is also getting national attention with mentions in the Washington Post and in working with members of the U.S. Congress to pass a provision for a federal tax credit for employers who participate in programs like Child Care Works starting in tax year 2026.

Schmidt is excited to see how the development and implementation of Missouri Child Care Works is being replicated. Kansas and Kentucky are launching similar models. What started with building the capacity to take a concept to reality, is now an active strategy to scale the innovative model in Missouri and replicate it outside of Missouri.

“That, to me, is the impact,” Schmidt said.