Get to Know: Along the Way

In the United States, women — often single mothers — hold the majority of low-wage jobs. These jobs usually require work hours in the evenings and on weekends when schools and daycares are closed, making the lack of adequate (and affordable!) child care one of the biggest obstacles to obtaining and maintaining employment.

Along the Way, a WOMEN’S WAY General Operating Fund grantee*, is working to combat this challenge by connecting working parents and families with childcare and support. We recently interviewed Kristina Valdez, Chief Executive Officer at Along the Way, to learn more about what Along the Way (ATW) is doing to combat the childcare crisis, the impact the WOMEN’S WAY General Operating Fund has had on their work, and what’s in store for Along the Way in 2023.

*Following our commitment to equity in grantmaking and in direct response to input from our community partners, WOMEN’S WAY launched the General Operating Fund in 2022 to provide unrestricted, 2-year grants to organizations primarily serving women, girls, and/or the gender-expansive community. You can learn more about the grant program here.

WOMEN’S WAY: Tell us a little bit more about yourself and your path to becoming Executive Director at Along the Way.

Kristina Valdez, MSW: I was a single mom when I took this job and finishing grad school for social work. This meant I was completing a three-year, part-time program every Saturday for seven hours while I was caring for my children. Being a primary caregiver and working at the same time was very difficult. When I found this job, four months after I graduated in 2020, the difficulties of childcare were fresh in my mind. And I thought to myself, ‘Along the Way is a diamond. We have to make this grow. I don’t care how we do it, but someway, somehow, we will grow it.’ My passion for Along the Way came from this personal experience and I knew, one way or another, we needed to find a way to make it work.

Give us a snapshot of Along the Way and the work you do.

There are 300,000 single moms in Pennsylvania. Because of childcare concerns, we have underemployed or unemployed moms. Some moms are only picking up shifts when they can find a friend or neighbor or someone else to watch their kids. Then there are some moms that are employed, but there’s the stress burden of having to do the patchwork [of constantly finding others to watch their kids]. They might be fully employed, but it’s really taking a toll on their mental health to not have guaranteed childcare.

Along the Way provides a pathway to financial security for single parents by 1) providing safe & reliable child care on an income-based sliding scale during nights and weekends so that single parents can work and/or advance their own education/training without the financial burden of high-quality childcare, 2) utilizing a holistic care approach that meets parents where they are on the continuum of surviving to thriving, 3) providing good jobs for our employed caregivers, and 4) inviting employers to be a part of the solution through our Pathway Project. For employers, participation means stabilizing their own workforce during hard-to-fill shifts, and the parents that participate. It is really an Economic Independence Program.

Let’s talk about the connection between care work and gender & racial equity.

This is a huge one. First, there’s the topic of caregivers and care professionals. Many of our clients are doing care work. They’re certified nursing aides or in another care industry. [The work they are doing] is among the lowest-paid and it’s an industry disproportionately represented by women of color. Care work isn’t valued in our economy and society proportional to its importance; people who work in the care industry care for our children, parents, grandparents, and loved ones, but the price they pay to do what they love is often being in poverty themselves. And it’s really holding women back. On top of the low-wage industry norm, the women of color and immigrant women who often do this work have also experienced systemic racism and injustice. That’s why it’s so important for us to elevate and sustain care work.

The average childcare wage is $13 an hour in PA. Our staff start at $20 and full-time folks get full benefits. We’re committed to compensating care work as dignified professional work — because it is. This is why, when we say Along the Way is investing in the most underrepresented, it’s no exaggeration.

Second, if you don’t have childcare, you can’t work, or, if you do work, and you have to leave your kids at home, you have a higher chance of losing your kids [to the child welfare system]. This is all related to systemic injustices. Moms we serve don’t have the access to a work-from-home job and so they’re literally put up against the wall where they can either work during the times when they can find a job and leave their kids home so that they can feed them, and hope that nothing happens; or they can choose to not work at all, make sure the kids are safe, and collect social support because they still need to feed their kids and take care of themselves. These decisions are impossible. But the narrative instead is that these women simply don’t want to work.

Tell us about some of the challenges Along the Way is tackling.

We know that Along the Way moves the most under-resourced moms into economic mobility and self-sufficiency. The majority of moms that we serve are within 200% of the federal poverty line. Many of the women have experienced poverty their whole lives and poverty is itself traumatic and also a risk factor for increased incidents of traumatic experiences. And that’s what we often see — we’ve served women who have survived domestic violence, navigated unplanned pregnancies, gone through a divorce, and women who were raised in the foster care system.

We’ve served single grandmothers who had kinship care of their grandchildren, and women who were technically married but are effectively single mothers (i.e. because their husband just didn’t come home one day and she had no idea where he is or a husband was detained in his home country by a lengthy immigration procedure, forcing her to navigate a brand new country alone). Almost 90% of our clients are women of color and 100% are full of potential. We’re seeing clients starting out part-time retail jobs with no career track, and then -after using our services- they’re becoming business owners and registered nurses. This is such important work, but it is incredibly hard to fundraise for.

What I didn’t know when I took this job is that the reason ATW served very small cohorts of families is because we had to fundraise every single cent through private donations because we miss every typical funding bucket. From a funder standpoint, we get pushback. We were serving five to six families at any given time and it is a really deep investment. It’s this kind of deep investment that helps people actually get out of poverty. Yet, a lot of funders want to see numbers and they want to see a lot of people served. I know that at WOMEN’S WAY, you are really committed to not doing that as a funder/grantmaker.

How has the WOMEN’S WAY General Operating Fund helped to expand Along the Way’s impact in the community?

Originally, we were going to use GOF funding to invest in a program for financial empowerment for women. We were hearing from clients that they wanted to learn how to manage, save, and invest money. Then, we started thinking more about whether this was the best way to meet the financial literacy needs of our clients. We have moms that are graduating or have graduated and are also interested in doing development work and giving back to Along the Way, so we thought, instead of having a class or something about financial literacy, we could help them to become fundraisers.

So for example, we are going to use the funds to hire a development person who is a woman of color and who teaches people how to, in her own words, ‘be badass fundraisers.’ Her goal is to flood the development space with women of color, who can really affect change. We’re working with her to get a cohort together of women who have graduated from our program and do this development incubator program, hoping that that would then give them the opportunity to take development jobs where they’re making good money.

The WOMEN’S WAY General Operating Fund has allowed for this flexibility. The fact that the funding is multi-year and unrestricted allows Along the Way to respond, in real time, and develop programming that responds to and benefits the women Along the Way is working with.

What’s coming up for Along the Way in 2023?

We’ve built a new funding model for Along the Way that we’re going to pilot in 2023. I was hearing from employers about how they think people don’t want to work anymore or that it’s just so hard to find anyone that’s good to stay with them. Yet, at Along the Way, we know that’s not true because there are 200 moms on our waiting list, and some are contacting us monthly to see if we’re accepting new clients so that they can work and provide for their kids. That’s why Along the Way’s new model is built to act as an employment matcher.

We will take moms that have passed our qualifications (meaning they have enough stability like reliable housing, reliable transportation, etc) and are therefore good candidates for reliable employment, and then match them to employers that have agreed to pay for a portion of in-home childcare. To support this work, we received a $3.26 million grant from Montgomery County that will match employer contributions. This pilot is starting in February 2023 with one employer and ten moms and will run for five months. The point of the pilot is to iron out the logistics of this employer-agency partnership because then, in the first full year of the project, we’ll have five employers and 50 moms. At the end of the three years, it’ll be 150 moms with 15 employers providing 300,000 hours of childcare.

(Check out Along the Way’s Economic Impact Childcare Calculator which helps PA businesses assess their existing financial losses due to their employees’ lack of adequate access to reliable child care.)

What keeps you pushing forward?

I think part of the reason that we’ve had the success we’ve had — going from an organization that has a $100,000 budget to a multimillion-dollar budget over the course of a few months — is because [our work at Along the Way] intersects with so many different sectors. We are not only a business solution that drives economic recovery, but we are an anti-poverty solution. We are also a child welfare solution, as well as an affordable childcare option during a childcare crisis.

I think it’s rare that one program has so many direct beneficiary groups. I can’t really think of any other program where employers, parents, childcare workers, and the government directly benefits from one program because the end goal is economic self-sufficiency and we’ve seen amazing outcomes so far. Most people that hear about us absolutely love our approach to solving some big issues.

How can individuals help to support Along the Way and your work?

The first thing I always say is to sign our statement of support. I encourage anyone, anywhere in Pennsylvania or beyond, to sign this statement of support because a big part of my job is advocacy. I am constantly meeting with legislators, state representatives, senators, congresspeople, etc to draw attention [to the childcare crisis and the need for caregiver support for shift workers]. When I can say, for example, there are 1,000 people in your community — 1,000 of your constituents — that have signed a statement of support saying that they care about this, then I can make a much larger impact.

And two — donate! I joke around that our main program is paying living wages to childcare workers so that other people can go to work. There’s no way around it — the program only moves forward with money. And the beauty of our model is that the COVID-recovery grant funding makes it affordable for employers to participate and community donations make it affordable for single mothers by offering an income-based sliding scale. For every $9 donated, we can offer a single mother a childcare hour for only $3. And for moms who are below 200% of the federal poverty threshold, $12 from the community allows us to offer our service for free to her until she gains economic mobility.

To learn more about Along the Way, visit alongthewaypa.org and follow them on social media @alongthewayinc

Other Resources

Further reading: CAP — Child Care Crisis is Keeping Women out of the Workforce | CAP — Black Families Work More, Earn Less, and Face Difficult Childcare Choices | National Fund — Race and the Work of the Future United States| NWLC — Policy Solutions for Investing Child Care | Urban — Segregated from the Start

See here for more information about the WOMEN’S WAY General Operating Fund.

Watch this Closing the Gender Wealth Gap Forum Recording about how to strengthen the childcare sector.