What’s working: Childcare, Care Work, and the Power of Collective Action
Hey Well Woman!
I've been sitting on some news for this show, and I'm glad I finally get to share it.
The Well Woman Show has started a partnership with the Better Life Lab at New America. They are a Washington, DC-based team of researchers and reporters who spend their time tracking what's genuinely working across the country on work, gender, and care. Not the private workarounds so many of us are patching together on our own, but the real, structural wins; the moments when a policy or a system actually gets rebuilt for the better.
From here on, I'll be bringing you one of their stories every so often, and today's is the first.
There's something else I want to name, too: this is a return to solo episodes for me, which I haven't done in a while. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it until I sat down to write this one.
Just me, talking through a story I couldn't stop thinking about, like this one. It's about a Texas city that took on one of the hardest, most stubborn problems in caregiving and got a result that early childhood education almost never sees.
How San Antonio Funded Universal Pre-K
Back in 2012, San Antonio had a problem a lot of cities know well: rising poverty, and a school system that wasn't keeping pace.
Julián Castro, the mayor at the time, pulled together local business leaders around an idea that was simple on paper and hard in practice: build a childcare policy solution funded well enough, and protected enough from political swings, that it could actually work long-term.
The answer was a dedicated sales tax, just an eighth of a cent, directed entirely toward early childhood education. Voters were skeptical. Public pre-K was still an unproven idea to a lot of people, and some worried it would just compete with existing schools. It squeaked through anyway, with barely more than half the vote.
What came next is the part worth knowing.
The program, now called Pre-K 4 SA, opened its doors within a year and started showing results almost immediately:
- Stronger reading and math scores by third grade, with the biggest gains among lower-income kids and English language learners
- Teacher retention is almost unheard of in early education. 322 of 324 teachers returned the following year
- More than 23,000 children served to date, most enrolled at no cost to their families
- An average income boost of $12,000 a year for participating families
Why the Second Vote Mattered More Than the First
Here's the detail that stuck with me most. Eight years after that narrow 2012 win, San Antonio voters were asked again whether to keep funding the program. This time it wasn't close. Seventy-three percent (73%) said yes.
That jump, from a bare majority to nearly three-quarters, is the actual headline.
It's not about the tax rate or the enrollment numbers. It's about what happens once a community can see, firsthand, what a well-built system does for the people around them. At that point, funding it just stops being a debate and starts being obvious.
A Parallel Closer to Home: New Mexico's Universal Child Care
I don't have to look far to see a version of this playing out already. New Mexico, where I'm based, built its own path to universal free child care, though it didn't happen through a public vote the way San Antonio's did.
Back in 2020, the state created a dedicated Early Childhood Education and Care Trust Fund. In 2022, voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing bigger withdrawals from the state's Land Grant Permanent Fund, which helped that trust fund grow substantially over the following years.
From there, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham used her executive authority to expand eligibility, and as of November 2025, every family in New Mexico (regardless of income) qualifies for free child care if they're working or in school.
Then, in March 2026, the state legislature caught up with the governor's move, passing Senate Bill 241 to formally write the program into law and secure its funding for years to come.
It's a different path than San Antonio's. It is built through trust funds, executive action, and legislation rather than a single ballot measure, but it comes from the same place: a community deciding, over time, that this is worth paying for.
What Childcare Policy Wins Like This Mean for Women
A theme that runs through nearly everything on this show is how often women end up absorbing the cost of broken systems: rearranging careers, patching together coverage, assuming the exhaustion is just part of the deal.
Childcare is maybe the clearest version of that pattern. We rarely stop to question whether the system itself needs to change, because we're too busy just getting through it.
San Antonio's story pushes back on that.
Systems like this don't fall from the sky, fully formed and untouchable. They get built, by ordinary people, through ordinary decisions, sometimes at something as unglamorous as a ballot box or an executive order. Which means they can be rebuilt, too and when they are, the payoff shows up everywhere at once:
- Women get more room to build stable careers instead of constantly renegotiating them around gaps in care.
- Families stop absorbing the financial hit of piecing together coverage on their own.
- Communities get more resilient, because the people raising the next generation aren't doing it on the edge of burnout.
✨ The Well Woman Principle: Self-trust is how we know and it doesn't only live inside one person's judgment. A community can practice it too. San Antonio's voters trusted their own instincts enough to fund something before the proof was in, and trusted themselves again once the evidence arrived, eight years later. That's self-trust operating at a scale bigger than any one of us.
If childcare is something you're wrestling with right now, I want to say this plainly: it's not a personal failing. The math rarely works for families because the system was never designed for it to work.
And if childcare isn't touching your life directly at the moment, I'd still ask you to pay attention to this one because more than half the people who voted “yes” in San Antonio weren't parents of young kids either. They backed it anyway, because they understood it wasn't only their problem to solve.
This is the first in an ongoing series I'm bringing you from the Better Life Lab at New America, spotlighting real solutions already working in communities across the country when it comes to childcare policy, gender equity, and work. You can read the original reporting on San Antonio's Pre-K 4 SA program by Rebecca Gale at The 74, and find more of the Better Life Lab's work at newamerica.org. Learn more about New Mexico's Universal Child Care program directly from the state at nmececd.org/universal.
Below is the full transcript of the episode.
Here's a number I want you to sit with for a second: 324 teachers were offered contracts to come back to their jobs next year. All but two said yes.
If you know anything about the world of early childhood education, you know that number should not exist. Turnover in this field is brutal. It's one of the most underpaid, undervalued jobs in the country, and it usually shows.
Except in one city, it doesn't. And I've spent the last week thinking about how they pulled that off and what it says about what's possible when a community decides something is actually worth paying for.
That's what we're getting into today.
WELCOME
Hi, I'm Giovanna Rossi, and this is The Well Woman Show.
Today's episode is a little different. It's a solo one. Something I haven't done in a while, and honestly, I've missed it. There's something about sitting with you directly, without a guest in the room, that lets me go a little deeper into a single idea. And today's idea is a good one.
INTRODUCING THE PARTNERSHIP
Before I get into it, I want to tell you about something new.
I've started a partnership with the Better Life Lab at New America. They're a team of researchers and reporters based in Washington, DC, and their whole focus is tracking what's actually happening across the country on work, gender, and care. Not the individual workarounds we're all quietly cobbling together to get by, but the real, structural solutions. The places where something is genuinely working.
So going forward, every so often, I'm going to bring you one of their stories. A bright spot. A place where people looked at a hard problem, one you and I both know intimately, and actually did something about it.
And the first one I want to share with you starts with a question I think about a lot.
OPENING / THESIS
It's hard to imagine how women in America, who carry so much of the weight of caregiving, could possibly thrive without a more robust and affordable child care system.
Well, in 2012, a city decided to stop imagining and just try something. San Antonio, Texas passed a ballot measure that allocated one-eighth of a cent in sales tax to go to early education. This passed narrowly. It was a tax increase, albeit a small one, and voters weren't entirely sure this would be a good investment. At the time, many public pre-K programs were unproven entities.
Fast forward to 2026, and this program has served over 23,000 kids. Most attend for free. The high-quality curriculum has translated to higher math and reading scores by third grade, better teacher retention in a field that typically has brutal turnover, and an average of $12,000 more in annual income for the families whose kids participated.
For a city with high poverty, or honestly, any city, an extra $12,000 a year in take-home income for families is a huge win.
But this story isn't about money.
There's a slippery slope when we distill childcare down to a purely economic concept: where the messaging shifts entirely to how more parents can go to work, stay in their jobs, have stability. That matters, yes. But so does the actual education of the children.
What this story is about is how voters made the change.
THE STORY, IN BRIEF
Back in 2012, San Antonio was facing a rising poverty rate and an education system that was falling behind other cities. The mayor at the time, Julián Castro, brought together local business leaders and landed on a simple idea: invest in high-quality early childhood education, and build a dedicated funding source so it wouldn't depend on the political mood of any given year.
This story was reported by Rebecca Gale, who covers child care for the Better Life Lab and also writes a newsletter on caregiving called It Doesn't Have to Be This Hard. She's done a lot of reporting on what actually works in this space, and San Antonio was one of her strongest examples.
It wasn't an easy sell. Plenty of voters weren't convinced four-year-olds belonged in a formal school setting at all, and some local school districts worried a new city-run program would compete with their own. It passed anyway, barely, with 53 percent of the vote.
Within a year, the program - Pre-K 4 SA - opened its first centers. And the difference showed up fast: independent researchers found that kids who went through the program had higher reading and math scores by third grade than their peers, with the biggest gains among lower-income kids and English language learners.
Teacher retention also stood out in a field known for losing people constantly because the program pays its teachers well and treats them like the professionals they are.
There's one mom in this report, Jasmin, who almost didn't enroll her son at all. She assumed a program that good, wouldn't have room for her family, and was surprised to find out it did, at no cost to her. She has since enrolled a second child and has plans for a third. Her story is worth reading in full if you want the details. I'll link it in the show notes.
WHY IT WORKED: THE VOTE
But here's the heart of it, and it's the part I most want you to sit with.
In 2020, eight years after that first ballot measure passed, it was up for a vote again. This time, it got 73 percent, almost three-quarters, of the vote.
Because once you build a high-quality program, people want to keep it. They can see what it does for the community. They can see it as part of the community. It stops being a question and becomes a foregone conclusion.
That's the actual story here. Not a subsidy. Not a line item. A community that voted, twice, to take care of its own kids together, and built something durable enough that it couldn't just evaporate the next time a budget got tight.
REFLECTION
I don't think every city has to copy San Antonio's exact playbook: the sales tax, the specific numbers, the timeline. But I do think every city can ask the same question San Antonio's voters answered twice: are we willing to pay, together, for something we all benefit from?
That's a different question than "how do we help parents get back to work." It's bigger than that. And I think it's the right one.
And honestly, this isn't hypothetical for me. Here in New Mexico, we're living through our own version of this right now. In November 2025, New Mexico became the first state in the country to offer universal free child care. No income limits, available to any family that's working or in school. It was signed into law this year, funded through a dedicated state trust fund rather than a sales tax like San Antonio's, but the underlying idea is the same: a place deciding, collectively, that this is worth paying for. I think about that every time I hear a family here talk about what that's meant for them.
Here's why this story landed for me the way it did.
So much of what we talk about on this show comes back to the same pattern: women navigating complex, broken systems and mostly doing it quietly, individually, as if the exhaustion of it is just the price of admission.
Childcare is one of the clearest examples of that. We patch it together. We rearrange our careers around it. We feel guilty when it's hard and even more guilty when we ask for help. And most of the time, we never stop to ask whether the system itself is the problem, because we're too busy surviving inside it.
San Antonio is a reminder that the system is not fixed. It's not handed down from somewhere untouchable. It's built, by people, through decisions, at a ballot box, and it can be built differently. That's not a small thing to sit with. It's actually kind of radical, when you let it be.
I think about Jasmin in this story, almost talking herself out of even trying, assuming a good program wouldn't have room for her family. I don't think that instinct is unique to her. So many of us carry some version of that same doubt: that the good thing, the supportive thing, the thing that could actually make this easier, probably isn't for us, or probably isn't real. And then it turns out it is. That's worth noticing in your own life, too: where are you assuming a door is closed before you've actually checked?
There's also something here about trusting collective effort, not just individual grit. I think back to a conversation I had on this show with Lucía Cirmi Obón, the feminist economist who ran national care policy in Argentina. She told me the real barrier to better care systems usually isn't that people don't value care. It's that almost no one has figured out where the money comes from. As she put it, "we had to collectively pay for this." We talk a lot on this show about self-trust. Trusting your own judgment, your own pace, your own no. But self-trust isn't the same as going it alone. San Antonio's story is really a story about a community trusting itself enough to invest in something before it had all the proof, and then trusting itself again, eight years later, with the evidence in hand. That's a version of self-trust too, just at a collective scale, and exactly what Lucía was describing.
So, here's what I want to leave you with.
If you're a parent navigating childcare right now, in whatever form that takes for you: this isn't a personal failing. The math doesn't work for most families because the system wasn't built for it to work. That's not you. That's the system.
And if childcare isn't your immediate reality, if this doesn't touch your life directly right now, I'd still ask you to hold onto San Antonio's example, because more than half of the people in that "everyone benefits" survey weren't caregivers either. They voted for it anyway. Supporting families with young kids, or aging parents, or anyone doing the quiet work of care, is something all of us have a stake in, whether or not we're the ones doing it today.
Here's a resource if you want to go further: the Better Life Lab has more reporting like this on their site, newamerica.org. I'll link the full San Antonio piece in the show notes, along with more of their work.
And here's a reflection to sit with this week: is there a "San Antonio moment" in your own community: some piece of care infrastructure, big or small, that people have quietly accepted as unfixable? What would it look like to ask, out loud, whether that's actually true?
This is the first of an ongoing series I'll be bringing you from the Better Life Lab: real solutions, already working, in states and communities across the country. If there's a bright spot happening where you live; something in your own community that's actually working when it comes to care, work, or gender equity, I'd love to hear about it.
