Tacoma families deserve affordable child care. This bill could help | Opinion

As a pastor and member of our Hilltop community in Tacoma for 31 years, I’ve seen how so many systemic problems disproportionately impact our Black and Brown families. Inequitable access to high quality education, housing and healthcare, along with discriminatory treatment by employers and police, to name just a few.

One that is as common a topic in my community as any is the lack of affordable, flexible, accessible high quality child care.

A large part of our community is made up of single parents, working odd hours in low-wage jobs. The faith community has tried to step up with solutions for working families by offering to create safe, reliable child care options, but the regulations and process have proven to be a significant challenge. Despite our collective efforts to help, the child care gap continues to persist, making it even harder for folks to make ends meet.

Nearly thirty years ago, then Gov. Gary Locke created a commission to study early learning for children 0 to 5. I participated in this effort alongside the governor’s wife, Mona Locke, Melinda French Gates and others. There was some progress and recognition of the importance of early learning for children 0 to 5. However, since that Locke-created commission, faith leaders have not been at the table as a partner in providing solutions for our community members. And here we are today, with Brown and Black community members facing as big a gap in access to child care as we ever have.

You can only stand being treated as non-relevant for so long. It is those closest to the problem who have the solutions. As famously put by leaders of the disability community in their fight against discrimination in the 1990s, “Nothing about us without us.”

As our state and country as a whole struggle with a child care crisis driven by high costs for parents and low wages for educators, facility and staff shortages to new threats from the Trump administration’s ICE deportation campaign and other racism-fueled attacks on immigrants, one of the best ways to solve this crisis is to involve the people on the ground closest to the problem and its solutions.

A bill before the state legislature would do just that by establishing a long-overdue Child Care Workforce Standards Board, a group that would be made up of parents, educators, businesses and community members who best understand the barriers that need to be broken down. The voices of those impacted most must be considered in a meaningful way, or we’ll still be talking about the child care gap for decades to come and our families, communities and economy will continue to suffer.

Let’s not let more years go by without making progress.

Bishop Lawrence White is pastor at Church of the Living God in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood.