UW-Madison’s Elizabeth Graue is a part of the “We Care for Dane Kids” team that took second place in the Alliance for the American Dream competition.
Graue is the Sorenson Professor with the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and the director of the Center for Research on Early Childhood Education (CRECE).
Graue and her colleagues tied for second place. “We Care for Dane Kids” will receive $300,000 in provisional funding as a winning finalist in the year-long Alliance for the American Dream competition.
Partners in the Dane Kids initiative also include the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, Reach Dance, the UW-Madison School of Social Work, the City of Madison, and Madison Out-of-School Time. This project features an innovative, multi-pronged approach to transforming the early child and after-school care sectors by means like increasing employee use of and employer contributions to dependent care tax benefits and using shared services networks to reduce operating expenses.
“Child care and out-of-school time care is expensive and hard to find, but absolutely essential to how our country’s economy functions,” the We Care for Dane Kids team explains about the project. “Despite the critical role this sector plays in our community, the workers who do this work still don’t earn enough. This challenge brought us together to find ambitious solutions to the dramatic under-investment in child care and out-of-school time. We are excited about the opportunity to solve these problems that impact so many households in Dane County.”
The other UW-Madison finalist, a project known as LIFT (Legal Interventions for Transforming) Dane, tied for first place, earning a $1.1 million award. This project proposes an online platform to provide workers with easy access to public data and services to reduce debt and eliminate barriers to jobs, housing, and economic stability.
Read a news release about the UW-Madison award winners here.