Our Impact

Our Story

Parent Voices started in 1996 and is a parent-led, parent-run grassroots leadership organization fighting for quality child care that’s accessible and affordable to all California families. Parent Voices Oakland combines community organizing, advocacy, and leadership development in its efforts to increase funding, improve quality, and provide better access to child care. Our long-term goal is to make quality and affordable child care available to all families in California and to support parents in becoming life-long advocates for their children. Parent Voices Oakland is one chapter of a Statewide network of 17 chapters in different Counties across California. Parent Voices Oakland supports, elevates and increases the visibility of families with low-wage workers who cannot afford the full cost of child care. PVO works with families to advocate for children and their communities by providing: education; information; and hands-on experiential leadership development opportunities. We approach this work in a way that is sensitive and responsible to their economic, cultural and situational needs. PVO believes, as a core value that parents are the experts of their experiences – and therefore essential to the policy-making process. We believe that every family has a right to choose a safe caring, environment for their children, thus enhancing the quality of life for all.

Win Timeline

Since inception, Parent Voices Oakland has had an incredible impact on the lives of low income families with young children and the Early Childhood Policy field in Alameda County:

• Worked in coalition with labor and teachers to win an 11 million dollar increase to annual state funding going to school districts across the state of California to help stop privatization and closure of public K-12 schools.
• Worked in coalition and partnership with Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D18) to pass AB 1912, which implements an emergency process to perform an equity impact analysis on school closures before a school district can vote to close public schools.
• Organized to win 1.86 million in emergency funds, $14mi investment from the city of Oakland that stopped layoffs for child care workers and ensured all HS sites remain open for at least another year.
• Petitioned to place on the ballot and won a county-side initiative, Measure C (2020) to bring revenue into Alameda County’s child care and children’s health systems.
• Organized and advocated to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to fund a pilot, Families United, that provided navigational support and emergency child care vouchers for families experiencing homelessness. The program was so successful that it was scaled up county-wide to become the “AC CARE” program.
• Successfully worked with other Early Childhood Systems professionals to reimagine the county-wide policy table, Alameda County Early Childhood Policy Committee, to include parents and child care providers.