It’s that time of year again—August recess! Congress has adjourned for the month of August and will not be back in session until September 9. During their month-long recess, many Members take the opportunity to re-engage with their community and the constituents they serve. This is a perfect opportunity for you to foster and cultivate those very important relationships with your Senators and Representative, as well as their key staff. You want them to know who you are and what issues you care about –early learning, child care, resource and referral services, etc., and how those issues are affecting your local community and your state.

Earlier this week, members of the Child Care Aware® of America Policy Team jumped on a plane and went to Tampa for a one-day on-site Advocacy Training. They worked closely with the Children’s Forum in Tallahassee to put together a jam-packed agenda for each of the 60 attendees at the training.

“The African saying, that it takes a village to raise a child is true, but the thing we need to remember all the time is that we are that village, it’s not somebody else, each one of us are part of the village and we have to daily say, what I can do to contribute to this, what can I do to help somebody further the life of a child,” stated Alma Powell, Chair of the Board at America’s Promise Alliance, discussing the importance of the advocacy community taking action on early childhood policies.

Last week, Senator Mikulski (D-MD), Senator Burr (R-NC), Senator Harkin (D-IA), and Senator Alexander (R-TN) introduced a bill to reauthorize the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the primary federal grant program that provides child care assistance for families and funds child care quality initiative.  Child Care Aware® of America announced its support for the “Child Care Development and Block Grant Act of 2013” introduced today, which would reauthorize the program for the first time in over 17 years.

Mission: Readiness, a nonprofit organization made up more than 350 retired military senior officers who are asking state and federal lawmakers to create policies that will help youth prepare for employment and military service, released a report showing how high-quality early learning programs could lead to 2 million more high school graduates and $150 billion in economic benefits. With 75% of all young Americans ineligible to join the military, largely as a result of not having a high school diploma or being able to score high enough on the military’s entrance exam to be allowed to serve, Mission: Readiness recognizes the economic and national security benefits of high-quality early learning settings.

Each week, nearly 11 million children under age 5 are in some type of child care setting for an average of 35 hours. It’s a statistic that gets mentioned often in conversations about the importance of child care in every community across the United States, and with good reason. Working families understand the need to not only have their children in a child care setting that will keep them safe and out of harm’s way, but also to ensure that in the years where the most critical development occurs that they are in a setting that promotes early learning.

With so many families looking for safe, but affordable child care, one thing is certain; Families need effective and efficient policies that work for working families.