How One Provider Found Her Voice as an Early Childhood Advocate

December 5, 2024

A person with woman with light skin and short red hair in a striped shirt and cardigan smiling against a gray background.

A Budding Early Childhood Advocate

Vikki Podlipni loves her job as a home-based child care provider and early childhood educator.

She’s been doing it for 17 years—alongside her mother. In fact, Vikki’s mom, a Polish immigrant, has run a home day care in Vikki’s childhood home since 1999, and has been a teacher even longer than that.

Vikki was in between jobs when her mother hired her, and says she fell in love with caring for children after initially not wanting to remain in the family business. She then went back to school part–time while working full–time to get her associate’s degree in early childhood education, and later, a degree to serve as a speech language pathology assistant.

Vikki’s Advocacy Journey

Yet over time, Vikki also experienced frustration with certain aspects of the early childhood system that made it more difficult for providers like her to care for children.

This was especially true in the early days of COVID-19, when licensing requirements for home-based providers were in flux and no one knew how to navigate child care during a global pandemic.

As she and members of her home day care association were trying to understand and adjust to changing requirements, she connected with fellow providers in a Facebook group and enrolled in a Teach Plus Fellowship that introduced her to early childhood advocacy. It was through her regular posts on social media that she met fellow advocates from IAFC’s Providers in Action and is now an active participant herself. She’s also a member of the Birth to Five Action Council, as a representative of home day care providers and a passionate advocate for children with disabilities.

Today, Vikki recommends advocacy training for all early childhood educators, including the basics, like filling out witness slips. She even hosted two regional listening sessions for child care providers (one in Polish), to gather input for the new Department of Early Childhood, inform the transition into one unified agency, and support the needs of families and providers.

It’s been especially helpful in her small child care association, TOTS, where she regularly meets with about 15-20 providers, many of whom are close to retirement and have been in the field for 20 to 30 years.

“They have no idea what’s happening in the next two years at all [with the new department], and how their input matters,” she explains, adding that their experience is incredibly valuable. “If my home day care association doesn’t know about the new Department of Early Childhood, I wonder how many more in Illinois don’t know about it. Many providers have no connection to each other, especially in rural areas.”

Nonetheless, most of these providers have the same suggestions, Vikki observes—such as digitizing important paperwork and developing more efficient ways of teaching and providing training on policy updates before they take effect.

IAFC’s Advocacy Legacy

In 1969, when Sylvia Cotton founded the Day Care Crisis Council of Metropolitan Chicago (DCCC)—now Illinois Action for Children—she understood that the child care environment needed fixing.

Conflicting licensing requirements and limited funding put kids’ well-being at risk, however unintentionally.

Vikki is one of thousands of parents, providers, and community members IAFC has mobilized to promote improvements to the early childhood system, who routinely respond to advocacy alerts, testify, and act on critical issues. IAFC also convenes We, The Village, a diverse coalition of hundreds of advocates—to urge legislators to prioritize the needs of Illinois’ youngest learners.

Sylvia Cotton in the late 60s/early 70s, founder of the Daycare Crisis Council of Metropolitan Chicago (DCCC), now Illinois Action for Children with a 4 other people, smiling.

“I never in my life thought I would advocate for anything,” says Vikki.

But she now sees herself as a liaison for her colleagues in conveying key policy information, and recognizes that home child care workers, particularly those who are not in an association, can “feel like they’re on an island all alone.”

“If my mom retires in the next couple of years, I want to do more advocacy work,” she says. “That’s where I see hope and progress.”

Together, our broad network of partners has:

Prompted lawmakers to consolidate early childhood services into one statewide agency—the new Department of Early Childhood.
Achieved a $244.5 million increase in Illinois’ FY25 budget for early childhood programs.
Encouraged the passage of legislation codifying the Early Childhood Access Consortium for Equity (ECACE) scholarship program into law, providing support for early childhood educators pursuing degrees and credentials.

When you give to IAFC, you invest in building a movement of advocates like Vikki—members of local communities who understand the importance of providing all children with a strong early foundation.

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Together, we’re creating a better early childhood system for families who depend on it.

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