LUCAS — Sunlight catches the blonde in 4-year-old Cameron’s hair as Amy Wiseman helps him into the swing.
Shy at first, his eyes brighten and a grin spreads across his face as she gives a gentle push. His joy soon erupts into full-body giggles as she pushes higher and higher.
“He could swing out here forever,” Wiseman said. “His record is 30 minutes straight.”
Cameron is Wiseman’s responsibility during the day while his parents work. Inside, Lincoln Logs, toy cars and craft supplies cover the dining room table. It’s the kind of cheerful clutter that fills her days as an in-home child care provider.
A 2014 graduate of Lexington High School, Wiseman has spent most of her life caring for children. She started babysitting for neighbors as a teenager and later studied early childhood education at Bowling Green State University.
After two years of college, she met a grandmother looking for help with her two grandsons. That job turned into six years of daily care — the kind of experience that defined her calling.
“It was such a rewarding experience to spend time with them every day and watch them grow,” she said. “I knew that taking care of children was exactly where I needed to be.”
Swinging Cameron in her backyard, Wiseman knows caring for children is her passion — but passion doesn’t pay the bills.
“I want to charge an adequate rate for myself, but at the same time, I don’t want to charge families something they’re not able to afford,” she said.
It’s a dilemma that defines the child care system she cares so deeply about.
“I really care about the overall wellbeing of families in America,” she said. “People should be able to have more opportunities to access child care and for it to be affordable. The more that’s available, the better livelihoods American families can have.”
Wiseman believes change is possible, but it won’t come easily.
“It would take a lot of people making an effort for it to happen,” she said. “There has to be some sort of breaking point — some kind of wake-up call — before things might really change.”
How to make change happen?
Wiseman’s story is not a unique one. Many providers and parents echo the same struggles with affordability and access to child care.
The problem isn’t a lack of passion or effort — it’s the feeling of powerlessness that follows. Everyone can see the cracks in the system, but few know how to repair them.
“I wish I could change something,” Wiseman said. “But I don’t know how.”
According to Amy Goyal, vice president of the Women’s Fund at the Richland County Foundation, the “how” begins with advocacy — by speaking up and sharing your lived experience.
“The data is there on this problem, on the impacts and what some of the solutions can do, and that’s really important. Data is foundational, but data is not what motivates someone to do something,” Goyal said. “What moves the needle is people telling their stories.”
Goyal has built her career around wielding the power of influence. Before returning to Mansfield with her family, she served as assistant vice president in the Office of Government Affairs at The Ohio State University, managing programs that connected policymakers, educators, and community leaders.
Advocacy, Goyal says, is not reserved for professionals. In fact, she believes ordinary people — not politicians or policy experts — make the most effective advocates.
“You don’t have to be qualified to be an advocate,” she said. “You are qualified through your lived experience. People with lived experiences are much better advocates, much more authentic and stronger advocates.”
What makes a story the most effective is knowing how to deploy it strategically, Goyal said.
“You cannot argue with somebody’s lived experience, and that’s why it’s so important for people to share it,” she said. “And if you can talk about your experience in a way that links to a problem they are trying to solve, then you’re rowing in the same direction.”
There’s also great power in numbers.
“Communities of people who have had a shared lived experience — people who have struggled with an issue — putting those people together is important because it creates momentum for the movement,” Goyal said.
“Those communities are what keep people motivated and in fellowship with each other.”
Strength in numbers
That kind of coalition work is happening at the state level through Groundwork Ohio, where leaders like Lynanne Gutierrez have built an infrastructure to turn those stories into policy.
As the president and CEO of Groundwork Ohio, Gutierrez leads one of the state’s most influential advocacy organizations focused on early childhood education and family well-being.
Unlike service providers or government agencies, Groundwork’s role is to connect the dots — helping local voices reach the policymakers who hold the purse strings. Gutierrez describes the organization as a kind of bridge between lived experience and legislation.
“We spend a lot of time building relationships, not just with state policymakers, but with the people who influence them,” she said. “That means early childhood professionals, community coalitions, families, business leaders, local officials. They all hold different types of power and influence.”
The obstacle to solving the child care problem isn’t awareness, Gutierrez said — it’s priority and money. She called Ohio’s current child care system a “broken market.”
“Even just to sustain the status quo in the next budget, Ohio will have to backfill $600 million in one-time funds,” Gutierrez said. “And that’s without serving a single additional child.”
The deeper problem, she said, is that the people most affected by child care policy are often the least able to participate in shaping it.
“Our families are challenged just to get through today — to get dinner on the table, to figure out child care for tomorrow,” Gutierrez said. “They don’t always have the time or trust in the system to engage, and that makes it harder to build political accountability.”
But the question of who holds the reins in making change is an easy one.
“The people hold the power,” Gutierrez said. “If we can build that movement — if we can build enough quantity, enough voices — it can overcome the deep relationships and competing interests that have kept the system stagnant.”
Gutierrez knows it’s a long game. But she believes in the work because she sees families who, despite all the barriers, keep showing up to make a difference.
“I have hope,” she said. “Hope is like a superpower. If they can keep showing up, we can too.”
What success looks like
If Ohio’s child care system represents the uphill climb, Vermont offers a glimpse of what’s possible when advocacy reaches critical mass.
For 10 years, Aly Richards has led Let’s Grow Kids, a statewide campaign with a single goal of building a high-quality, affordable child care system for every family in Vermont.
Richards said the movement focused on three key facets: people, policy and programs. From the start, her team knew success required structure and urgency.
“We put all we had into this effort,” she said. “We built a one-stop campaign focused on how to actually get this done, and how to do it within a 10-year timeframe. That deadline gave us discipline and accountability, both inside and outside the organization.”
Over the last decade, Let’s Grow Kids mobilized more than 42,000 Vermonters — about six percent of the state’s population — to take action.
“People have the power,” Richards said. “Without the movement we built in Vermont, the law never would have changed. Vermonters came together and said, we can do big, bold things — we have to — because if we don’t, we won’t have a functional economy.”
The campaign’s success rested on two things: building belief and building trust.
“The lack of belief was stymieing,” Richards said. “That’s why we had to get some wins on the board to show this was possible.”
And trust, she added, is what made the effort sustainable.
“The speed of trust is real,” she said. “You can be as well-meaning as you want, but it’s got to be deeper than that. You have to put leadership in place for those most affected.”
By 2023, the movement’s persistence paid off: Vermont lawmakers passed Act 76, a first-of-its-kind bill establishing a sustainable funding source for child care through a 0.44% payroll tax shared between employers and employees. The law passed with bipartisan support, and the legislature even overrode a governor’s veto.
Within two years, the results are measurable: more than 1,400 new jobs, 1,700 new child care spaces, and over 4,000 families receiving financial assistance, Richards said. For the first time since 2018, Vermont recorded more child care centers opening than closing each year — a sign the system is turning a corner.
Richards said that transformation — from disbelief to impact — came down to one thing: raising the voices of those affected.
“Tell me what you care about, and I’ll tell you why you care about child care,” she said. “If you care about the economy, healthcare, or education, this is your issue.”
Her advice to anyone hoping to make change echoes the heart of her campaign.
“Lift your voice and tell your story,” she said. “Talk to your neighbors, your friends, your legislator. Write an op-ed. You never know what will be the spark that lights it up.”