Blog
ECE Ambassador Builds Momentum with Five New Leaders
For more than four years, Milwaukee Succeeds’ Early Childhood Education (ECE) Ambassadors have been showing us what it means to turn lived experience into leadership. Now, five new Ambassadors are adding their voices to the cause, bolstering the team as we head into another budget cycle. Together, these 17 Ambassadors are bringing powerful insights and passion to our work, helping us unite the community and push for continued investment in ECE.
Seeing the Value: What Early Educators Want Milwaukee to Understand
Through the Stability Project's PhotoVoice component, educators used photos and personal reflections to document the work that often goes unseen – and to share what they want Milwaukee to better understand about ECE. Together, their stories paint a powerful picture of the day-to-day life of early educators – and the critical role they play in supporting children, families and communities.
Five Youth-Led Projects Selected to Receive Grant Funding
Five youth-led projects have been selected to receive funding through Milwaukee Succeeds’ Youth-Led Grantmaking Project – turning ideas created by young people into real action across Milwaukee.
Making the Invisible Visible: Introducing the ECE Churn Metric
To better understand what’s been happening beneath the surface of our ECE sector, Milwaukee Succeeds launched the Stability Project – a first-of-its-kind effort that brings together data, PhotoVoice and focus groups. A key part of this work is a set of new ECE-specific metrics developed by the Milwaukee Succeeds data team. The first among them is churn, which shines a light on the sector’s instability.
Understanding Stability in ECE
To better understand which child care programs are able to persist despite ongoing challenges, Milwaukee Succeeds developed a second metric: the stability rate. While churn measures turnover, the stability rate measures consistency, helping us identify which programs remain open year after year and where long-term endurance exists within the ECE sector.
Tracking Milwaukee’s Child Care Closures
Over the course of the Stability Project, Milwaukee Succeeds has worked to better understand what instability in ECE really looks like – and what it means for our city. First came churn, then came stability. Now, we’re looking at the most visible and immediate form of instability: program closures.