The Child Care Task Force (CCTF) of the Wisconsin Women's Network meets monthly. For more information contact the WWN office.

The CCTF is composed of local and statewide organizations and individuals committed to quality early education and care, family and group child care providers who recognized that affordable, accessible and high quality child care must be available for all families.

The Task Force is guided by the mission

For more than twenty years, the Task Force has been instrumental in highlighting child care as a vitally important economic development, child and family development issue. Key legislative successes include:

• Increased investment in Wisconsin Shares, and funding the T.E.A.C.H Early Childhood ® WISCONSIN scholarship and bonus program and R.E.W.A.R.D. ™ WISCONSIN stipend program
• Achieved child care as a mandated service for each county to fund through Community Aids.
• Creating Child Care Resource and Referral services statewide, providing quality improvement and child care expansion funds.
• Eliminating waiting lists for Wisconsin Works (W-2) child care (now called Wisconsin Shares).

These successes are due in part to work of the Task Force in tracking state and federal issues; and collaboration and information sharing among diverse individuals, agencies and programs. The Task Force has become a valued and respected resource in the early education and child care field.

Update - June 2004
by Mary Babula

The Wisconsin Women’s Network Child Care Task Force meets monthly, usually the first Friday of each month at 10:00am in the State Capitol. If you want to learn more about this task force, sign up to be on an e-mail list, or attend meetings, please contact the Wisconsin Women’s Network office. This task force is selecting new leadership, because Chair Jane Penner-Hoppe recently accepted a job as a policy analyst with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, to work on initiatives such as KidsFirst.

In the coming months, the Child Care Task Force will work as a member of the Wisconsin Child Care and Education Coalition to help shape Governor Doyle’s recently announced KidsFirst plan to invest in Wisconsin’s children. In his initiative, the Governor plans to promote quality child care and four-year-old kindergarten, improve foster care and child welfare, start a unique home visiting program for new parents, launch oral health initiatives, and a series of other efforts to improve the lives of our kids. Most of these items will be developed for the 2005-2007 state biennial budget. Work groups will be established to prepare more detailed proposals. For more information on this plan, see the State of Wisconsin website, http://www.wisgov.state.wi.us/docs/kidsfirst.pdf.

One item for which Governor Doyle is requesting immediate action is for the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee to approve spending $5.4 million from a bonus Wisconsin received from the federal government relating to the W-2 Program (the federal money is called TANF—Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). The proposal would restore $3.5 million to the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood ® WISCONSIN Scholarship program and R.E.W.A.R.D. ™ WISCONSIN Stipend programs, $720,000 to the Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies and $1,008,500 to the child care infrastructure including technical assistance services such as the Wisconsin Child Care Improvement Project, The Registry, the Child Care Information Center, the Child Care Resource and Referral Network and the Intertribal Coordinating Council.

Child care advocates hope the Joint Finance Committee will take action on this proposal in June. The Wisconsin Child Care and Education Coalition member organizations are working to get this proposal approved.