Solving the Childcare Crisis: Donna Sneeringer’s Strategic Vision | Childcare Series

Intro: Welcome to another edition of Inspired Stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes how they’ve overcome adversity and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Kodespode and today’s guest is Donna Snarringer, Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Child Care Resource Center, a community-based, non-profit organization that provides an array of services largely focused on helping families raise their young kids to get them off to a good start in life. They work to provide childcare support, connect families with childcare options, including both private care as well as Head Start. They coordinate payments for care and offer additional support such as home visiting, mental health consultation and more. Their organization also oversees government relations and research efforts to drive public policies and funding related to childcare. They currently serve about 50,000 kids through their subsidized childcare voucher program.

Donna brings a wide array of experiences to the job including government affairs, public relations, public policy, non-profit management, early care and education and child advocacy. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBAC Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our proprietary programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Child Care Resource Center, Donna Snarringer. Thanks for making your time to share your story today.

Donna Sneeringer: Thanks so much for having me. I really look forward to the conversation.

Anthony Codispoti: All right, so tell me about the path that led you to your current role at CCRC.

Donna Sneeringer: Well, careers are a journey, as you know, and I started off with a degree in child development from Cal State Northridge as a young person and realized pretty quickly that I wanted to work on behalf of kids, but not directly with kids, and fell into a job at the Child Care Resource Center when it was a very small nonprofit. In the earlier part of my career, I spent many years working there in a lot of different capacities doing program work, helping families find childcare, working with childcare providers to improve their business, and eventually took a different position with another agency in Northern California, spent about 10 years there and started to get more and more involved in public policy.

I went back to school, got a graduate degree in public administration and political management from USC, and really made that transition to leaning into how do we make better systems and how do we really craft access to supports and programs for families and what they need today. And so I have been working in that ever since, have been with CCRC again for about 11 years, and really enjoy the work I do every year is different, and it really does give me an opportunity to take my collective knowledge from all the years of working in this industry and try to make things better, try to look at things more holistically, and try to work with decision makers and program administrators to innovate and create the best services that we can.

Anthony Codispoti: So what’s the size difference between when you were first with the organization and where it is now?

Donna Sneeringer: So when I worked for CCRC at the beginning of my career, I was their 28th employee, and we now have about 1300.

Anthony Codispoti: Wow, that’s a pretty big size difference.

Donna Sneeringer: It’s a pretty significant size difference, and there were some major policy shifts at the national level and in California over the past couple of decades that really gave that opportunity for growth, but also it came from really expanding our view of the work that we do. So instead of just relying on the core services we started with really branching out and adding in Head Start, adding in a lot of other supportive service contracts so that we could really be holistic in our approach, and it really allows us to provide the greatest opportunity to the kids and families that we work with.

Anthony Codispoti: What were some of the national policy changes that took place which sort of opened up some of these opportunities for expansion?

Donna Sneeringer: So in the early 1990s, the country passed the first Child Care and Development Block Grant legislation, which is funding to help families pay for childcare, and it is a program that still is in existence. It has grown over the years slowly, not as quickly as it probably needs to, so that was the first real major investment that was made at the federal level, and then welfare reform made some major changes also in the later part of the 1990s, where there was an acknowledgement that you couldn’t really ask parents to go back to work if they didn’t have care for their kids. So you had a big shift with that, and then more recently, really since the pandemic, there has been both a national and state understanding of the critical importance that childcare plays in making sure our economy runs. It was maybe two weeks into the pandemic in 2020 when Governor Newsom at the time declared childcare to be an essential service, because if nurses, doctors, first responders, people that worked in food service, logistics, if they couldn’t get to work because they had nowhere for their children to go, everything would stop, and so we were pulled into that essential service band at that point, and I think it really was an eye-opening experience for many folks who hadn’t really paid attention to the critical role that childcare played in people’s ability to get to work. That really did change things pretty significantly for us.

Anthony Codispoti: It wasn’t like COVID was the first time that childcare was important, it was just the first time that maybe a bigger spotlight got shown on it, so people who don’t have kids of that age are like, oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense. There won’t be a doctor to see me or a nurse to help me out if somebody isn’t there to watch their kids.

Donna Sneeringer: Absolutely, and it’s often been a hidden conversation. It’s a conversation that parents, often moms, to be honest, try to deal with quietly behind the scenes and have historically, there’s a lot of familial support that happens where you have family relative caregivers, but there also is the formal childcare system where you have childcare centers, licensed family childcare homes, and folks who provide this service as a business.

So I think that we’ve sort of just let it be a hidden issue, something that I think from time to time it bubbles up for employers that it’s an issue for their employees, but when it really came down to they can’t come to work, that was really an eye-opening moment. And I think, particularly for folks in the healthcare space, but if you think about those of us who were lucky enough to shelter in place at home, we relied on Amazon. We relied on Grubhub and food delivery, and we still had to, there were core functions that still had to keep going, and the people that worked in those places needed that support.

Anthony Codispoti: And of course, that remains true even today. Absolutely. There’s still workers across all kinds of different parts of the economic spectrum that still need that kind of help. And for some families, at one end of the economic spectrum, they can afford to pay for the care. Folks maybe in the middle can afford part of it. Some folks can’t afford. So tell me how you can kind of step in and help people at all different stages.

Donna Sneeringer: So I think it’s important to note that childcare as an industry is a textbook example of a failed economic market. Because the economics of childcare don’t pencil out. The cost of providing the service is more than the families mostly can afford to pay.

And almost every dollar you pay for childcare goes into paying the workers who care for the children, but their wages are very, very low. And so one of the ways you overcome a broken economic market is through public investment. And so that is really what we have seen begin to happen with the changes that have happened over the past few decades, where you had an influx of funding from the Child Care and Development Block Grant from the welfare to work changes that happened in the 90s. And with a lot of money during the pandemic for pandemic relief, childcare was front and center in many of those conversations to try to fill that gap so that people could have the care that they needed. So the programs that we run are two types. One where we enroll families based on their income and we assist in paying for childcare. It’s limited. There aren’t enough…

Anthony Codispoti: Sorry, Donna, just to clarify, are you enrolling them in one of your centers?

Donna Sneeringer: No, so we’re enrolling them in a financial assistance program where they can pick care. They can pick a childcare center, a family childcare provider, a family funder, neighbor, and then we make arrangements to pay for the service up to a ceiling that is set by the government. Then we also run direct care programs like Head Start or State Preschool, where we actually run the childcare facility and we enroll the families in those programs and serve them directly there. So we do both types of support, but it is something that is in demand. We just had a pretty major expansion of our funding in California. One of our major programs for working families had significant investments made in it. Governor Newsom made a commitment and he has thus far quadrupled the size of the program.

Wow. And we are now again fully enrolled and have 30,000 kids on a waiting list. So the need for this service so far outstrips the available benefits that there is a constant pressure to try to make sure that we can serve as many families as possible and thus the advocacy and education that’s needed to make sure that people are aware of this gap.

Anthony Codispoti: Is all the funding come from different levels of government?

Donna Sneeringer: Yes, primarily the funding comes from government. As I mentioned, a lot of it originates at the federal level. The state of California is pretty generous in their contributions. We do have some local government engagement. I think you’ll see in the news periodically that there are local government initiatives that have passed in different jurisdictions where they’re trying to add to the solution. And it is something that I think is getting the kind of attention it probably has needed for a long time and there’s more work to do to really fix and build the system for the future.

Anthony Codispoti: Any thoughts on where that additional funding can come from? I mean as I think about sort of the public school system K through 12, I believe that most geographies fund that through property tax, correct?

Donna Sneeringer: It varies from state to state. Some states don’t have property tax. Some states don’t have income tax. So you have a little bit of variance depending on the state. But clearly there are public investments needed to overcome this shortfall. And we live in a world and an economy that is running 24-7. Most families, every able-bodied adult needs to work to help against meat. And really having access to these types of support is going to be critical to maintaining our economic strength and our ability to grow going forward.

Anthony Codispoti: So I’m 50 years old. When I was a kid, obviously I didn’t understand what was going on in the world, but I don’t remember childcare being a thing. Did I just grow up in a bubble or has it become way more prominent now?

Donna Sneeringer: It has become way more prominent. I’m around your age and I also probably had no idea that this was an issue. But I also grew up in a time where it was very common to have mom at home. And that has changed. We have a very different world and while there are families who make that choice and that’s a valid choice if it works for them economically, for many it doesn’t work.

You have single-parent families where that’s not an option at all. And you have generations now of working women who have tremendous education and skill that they’re bringing into our country and into our economy. And the loss of them from the workforce at this point would be really difficult. I forget I was at an event a couple years ago and over half the graduates from MIT in engineering are women.

So the odds of this spinning backward to where you and I grow up is not likely. And for many people I think it wasn’t really real then either. And for those that it worked for, it worked, but it was an ideal even then. And a lot of the programs that we administer really started in the mid-1970s. And if you think back even further in history, the first time the United States had a major investment in child care was during World War II. And the reason was we needed Rosie to go do her work with the Rivets and we had to have a place for her to put her kids.

So the federal government during World War II passed the Federal Lanham Act which set up the nation’s first subsidized child care program to support the war effort. So it’s not a new concept. It’s certainly been emerging.

And I think it is something that as we have had more equality in the workplace, more opportunity for women, more opportunity for families to make individual choices. And if that means pursuing career, there are ways to support this differently.

Anthony Codispoti: So a couple of the ways that you help families is you can either enroll them in your own programs or you can help to fund care through other methods, whether it’s a family member or friend who’s taking care, a small child care center, one of the bigger standalone centers. And so how do you sort of decide who gets which type of service or is that something that the family gets to choose?

Donna Sneeringer: The family gets to choose. A lot of it is based on availability and where there are opportunities to enroll. As I mentioned, we have waiting lists. So if you get an opportunity to take a space that’s in one of our facilities and there’s no availability for the portable financial assistance, then you know, you’ll take what families take what they can get, typically. And then if you are in our financial assistance program where we assist in paying for care, it is a parent choice program. It is governed by a federal statute so the family can pick whatever type of care they want. And then they are able to pursue the type of care that meets the needs of their kids and their family. One of the things I’ll put my child development hat on for a minute is what works for your two-year-old might not work for your four-year-old or your seven-year-old and the needs of families change over time. Often they have more than one child. So the beauty of our financial assistance programs that allow parents to choose is they could change providers.

They can use more than one provider at a time. And as their children grow and start school, they may not need a full day experience, but they do need before and after school care. And we have many, many families who work in our 24-7 economy who need care evening, weekend, holiday, and that program allows for them to find that during those hours they needed as well.

Anthony Codispoti: Can they use that financial assistance anywhere or does it have to be like on a list, place that has to be on an approved list?

Donna Sneeringer: So it varies from state to state. And in California, they can choose licensed care that is licensed by the state of California. Most states have some sort of licensing system. We also allow for what we consider to be licensed exempt, which is the family, friend, and neighbor option. Some states do that. Some states don’t. So the rules do very nationally a bit.

Anthony Codispoti: So there are a number of other organizations like yours around the country that provide similar services?

Donna Sneeringer: There are. And because the federal child care and development block grant is a national program, there are organizations or state agencies that do this type of work. We work through a national association called Child Care Aware of America, where wherever you are in the country, you can go on their website and you can identify where you could find a resource and referral agency like us that will then connect you to what is available in your state and in your community.

Anthony Codispoti: And so are you the only one in your geographical region? You’re the only one in California? How does this work? Do you get territories?

Donna Sneeringer: We are regional. We all are assigned territories based on our contracts with the state. In California, there are about 60. California is a pretty big state. California is a big state. So we have 58 counties. And so we’ve got some areas where there are more than one. Some areas where there’s only one. Some areas where one agency covers multiple counties. It depends on the population density. And it’s all driven by the population base where young kids are and how the agreements are set up.

Anthony Codispoti: Are they all set up as nonprofits?

Donna Sneeringer: Most. Some are also in county offices of education. So the local school districts may have these contracts. Some a handful are in local government in counties. But I think the majority are in community based nonprofits in California.

Anthony Codispoti: So no for-profit organizations that are set up like this?

Donna Sneeringer: No. We’re all nonprofit based.

Anthony Codispoti: Do you feel like you’re in competition with any of these other organizations? Are you competing for dollars or attention or anything else?

Donna Sneeringer: I think in the nonprofit community, we are pretty collegial. We all work collaboratively together. We have to transfer families. If you saw a family is receiving services from us in Los Angeles and they move to Fresno, we work with the agency in Fresno to make sure the family services follow them. We are seeing more for-profit competition coming in. The challenge is they don’t necessarily have all of the information. They aren’t connected to the licensing entities.

And they may not have the full picture where we are as contractors of the state given regular updates and regular information so that we are giving families as complete a picture as we can of what’s available in their community.

Anthony Codispoti: What does for-profit competition look like? Because it seems like the majority of your funding is coming from the government. Can for-profit entities get access to the same kind of funding?

Donna Sneeringer: They are funded differently. Often they are working with businesses, trying to work to support employees that different businesses may be trying to provide childcare services to. I think one of the things we are really eager to make sure that the broader community understands is some of the things that they are offering are already paid for by public funding. And that businesses really could access these private, community-based nonprofits rather than having to expend resources on a for-profit entity. But there are different services that they are offering. It’s a pretty new development. So we are trying to figure out how all the pieces may fit together. But we certainly want to make sure that people know that there are already available services. Whatever the for-profit community brings in is a value add and not taking away from existing resources that everyone should be able to access.

Anthony Codispoti: Because it sounds like you’ve got your at full enrollment, you’ve got a pretty big waiting list. So this could be a help to that for those folks who are on that waiting list.

Donna Sneeringer: It could be. And one of the things I know some of the companies we’ve been talking to where there are employers who want to offer say a childcare benefit where they want to provide a stipend to their employees to help offset the cost of childcare. There are different arrangements that could be made and we would be eager to do those things as well. But it’s a difficult landscape for employers.

I think many times employers are pressured to provide the care or provide an onsite childcare option. And that gets complicated. It’s a complicated business to run. If you have a brick and mortar childcare facility, you often can’t meet the needs of all of your employees. And your employees’ needs are changing every day.

Their children are growing. You have new employees that come in. And then there become equity issues with your employees that don’t have children that you’re providing a benefit there, then not for them. So we really encourage employers to seek out their nonprofit partners and see what we could do to help them support the broader community-based childcare system and not take that responsibility on themselves when, for many, it’s just a burden they’re not ready to get into.

Anthony Codispoti: Donna, help us understand what a chief strategy officer does.

Donna Sneeringer: I’m creating it as I go. I think my job really is to be up in the crow’s nest of the ship, seeing where we’re headed, what possibilities are out there, what threats are out there, and how we can really position our organization to meet the needs of our community, live up to our mission, and identify resources to expand and strengthen our services. So in my work, I oversee all of our external communications work.

We have a pretty robust presence in social media. We do a lot of video work, just basic education, trying to help families understand what’s available to them, a lot of local outreach and engagement, and we also do a lot of work with child care providers to make sure they have the resources that they need to run their business. I’m also responsible for our research division, where we really take a deeper dive, do a lot of needs assessment work, looking at where there are gaps, what families are needing right now, what their day-to-day reality looks like, and how we can design a system that meets their needs. And our government relations team, where we are really trying to partner with our elected officials and their staff to make sure they’re up to speed on the realities in their communities. We do a lot of education, trying to explain to them what the child care supply looks like, where there might be what we call child care deserts, where there’s not enough care to serve the number of kids that are needing support, how many families are receiving subsidized care, how many families are in need of additional support, and really trying to, as I said, craft the best solutions for the most people.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, I had the chance to talk with a number of child care center owners, several across the state of California. And so anecdotally, I get to hear a lot of stories about, you know, COVID was really tough. Some people are still trying to recover from that.

A number of centers never recovered, they shut down, they went under, probably contributing to this, you know, child care desert that you’re talking about in some locations. Again, like the stories I get to hear, they’re anecdotes, they’re many of them that tell the same kind of story, but I’m curious from a data point of view, what does the big picture kind of look like coming out of COVID?

Donna Sneeringer: So coming out of COVID, I think what you’re hearing anecdotally is what we’re seeing more systemically. We are seeing a lot of providers that are, you know, struggling with the increased cost of doing business. One of the challenges is just your cost for your employees has gone up.

We’ve seen multiple minimum wage increases in California, which is great for the workers, but with such a small margin on your business, there’s very little room for error. And I think we’ve also seen in California a pretty significant increase in public investment in school-based preschool, where a lot of four-year-olds are now going to a transitional kindergarten program at their local elementary school. And often for child care providers, that four-year-old age group was critical to their ability to break even financially because of the adult to child ratios with younger children.

That was kind of that age group where they could really hold it together. So we really are seeing a lot of struggling in our child care provider community. We also have an aging population of family child care providers, the folks who are licensed to do care in their own homes. They are reaching retirement age or past retirement age and still doing that work, and the influx of new people coming in is not as quick. And for many reasons, the workforce in child care has largely been women, often women of color, and it has been not a well-compensated field historically. And the good news for women is there’s a lot more opportunity for women, and they’ve got a lot of women getting much more robust education, and they have a lot of new opportunities where they don’t necessarily have to take that lower-paying job.

And we as a society have grown accustomed to having that cheap labor, and that’s going away. And I think that’s part of the pressure on the system is, well, what are we going to do to make these competitive wage jobs to attract young people, to want to work with young kids? I think it’s some of the most important work you could do.

We know that the first three years of a child’s life are the most rapid period of brain development. There’s very few times that you can have that kind of impact in the lives of others, but you also have to pay your bills. So, you know, trying to look at the long-term sustainability and what the system will have to adapt to to be able to have accessible, affordable care is really one of the big challenges.

Anthony Codispoti: And so, is the answer more government funding?

Donna Sneeringer: I think it’s one of the answers. You know, I think that there’s a lot of different things that folks are looking at. Clearly, you’re looking at an expanded footprint for public school. One of the challenges with that is public school doesn’t really align with most people’s work days, so you still have to have some kind of childcare partnership around that.

So we are in a lot of conversations trying to figure that out. More accessible paid family leave for those first few months of an infant’s life, so that there’s less pressure and families could take those first few months to stay home and bond with their infant. I think we would be really supportive of that. And then obviously continued look at different public solutions. And you know, it’s interesting that childcare is an area where there’s been quite a bit of bipartisan cooperation in government. It is something that is recognized across the aisle as an issue that we need to deal with in our economy.

How we get there is the trick and where the compromises will come and how we try to put different proposals together will be the work of the next few years.

Anthony Codispoti: The other thing that I hear from a lot of owners of childcare centers, you just touched on, transitional kindergarten. So for those listening who aren’t familiar with the industry, there’s different ratios of adults to kids required by the state. Obviously when they’re younger, they’re infant ages, you need more adults to kids.

So that costs, that care costs more to deliver. And as you get into the older groups, and particularly that four and five-year-old group, the ratios are more favorable. And so this tends to be, like you said, where the childcare centers can make their money. They’re not breaking even, maybe even taking a loss on those younger ages as a way to be able to help families and keep them in the system. And so now as transitional kindergarten came in, they can’t get that full day care that they’re getting at a childcare center. That’s the trade-off.

But for parents who can make do with it, it’s free and it’s hard to walk away from free. And so I’m talking to a lot of owners who are like, we don’t know what we’re going to do. We don’t know how we’re going to keep the doors open. Is there any relief in sight for them? Do you have any advice or suggestions?

Donna Sneeringer: You know, well, I’ll speak to transitional kindergarten just a bit, which is a California model that the state of California has implemented that is all school-based. And it is, as you mentioned, really focused on serving four-year-old children. Other states have done this, but done it differently. If you look at states like New York, where they actually started with a model similar to California, but realized it was impacting their supply of care for younger children, so they began to build public-private partnerships so that families could have that transitional kindergarten preschool experience in their childcare program, they would be able to have that full day full year service, and it would be a partnership and funded in the same way as the school-based system. California’s not gone that route. California’s gone an all-public route. Of New Jersey’s another example where they have built this public-private partnership model that integrates the existing childcare system into the delivery, as has Illinois.

We have, I have personally, and my organization has been an advocate that we really need to think about that mixed delivery model and including the existing childcare providers in the delivery of preschool services so that they can sustain and so that we can sustain our infant toddler care supply, but that’s not been the direction the state has gone thus far.

Anthony Codispoti: Do you see that changing at any point down the road or do they feel pretty locked into what they’re doing?

Donna Sneeringer: You know, I think that there are differing opinions in the state legislature and in the administration, and typically what I see happen is we’ll reach a pain point where something’s going to have to give and then we’ll have a different conversation. You know, and I know that the transitional kindergarten piece you’ve heard from the childcare provider side, it’s not so smooth necessarily on the public school side either because the needs of four-year-old children are quite different than the needs of older elementary children and it isn’t a hand-in-glove kind of fit for them. So I think you see varied levels of integration of TK into their public education system depending on the district.

So I would say we’re very much in flux at this time. I don’t know where it’s going to land long term, but it certainly is a place where people need to be involved and really lift up what they believe is most beneficial either to their own family or to their community.

Anthony Codispoti: How would you characterize the success or lack there of other programs where there’s more of that partnership model?

Donna Sneeringer: They seem to be doing quite well. I know there have been several study trips done where folks have gone to look at what’s happening in New York and New Jersey and Illinois and they seem to be on a good path where there is the partnership.

You know, with any public system and any launching of new work, there’s a period of adjustment. I’m sure that there are bumps in the road, but it does seem to be a good model to both offer a universal preschool education to four-year-old children and to support the early childhood opportunities for birth through three.

Anthony Codispoti: Do you think we’ll ever see a federal child care solution or do you think this stays with the states?

Donna Sneeringer: Well, a lot of the funding starts at the federal level and the way the federal government has handled most of it has been through block grants, which means they send a chunk of money to the state and then the state has to follow certain amount of rules but are largely able to implement their own local programs. We got close in the 1970s before my time, but in the 1970s there was a universal child care act that was vetoed by President Nixon.

That was the closest I think we have come. There have been proposals in the Senate in the past few years. Senator Warren and Senator Murray both have had different proposals which would have dramatically expanded federal support for child care. We will see how those things play out, but there certainly is discussion about the need for a greater role at the federal level, particularly as states, even states with a lot of resources like California have limits on what they can do. There will be a point where California has exhausted its resources to be able to do this without support from the federal government. That will be a tipping point for us.

Anthony Codispoti: What are some of the other services that CCRC provides, Donna, that we haven’t touched on yet?

Donna Sneeringer: We do a lot of different work to try to support families with young kids. We’ve been really building out and expanding our home visiting services which are available to new parents. When you bring a baby home from the hospital, it’s a scary time.

We’ve never done that before. You don’t necessarily have the kind of extended family you would have had. We have home visitors that can go out and support new parents and just learning routines and basic development and how to move into that space of being a parent. It’s a big transition. We’ve also expanded our offerings around behavioral health. Another thing that got a lot of attention during the pandemic and since has been the tremendous stress on families and on children. We have a variety of different programs. We’ve been doing to support families with access to behavioral health and mental health consultation for childcare providers which largely goes in and works with the provider on how to manage different behaviors in children.

Children, when they’re stressed or have been through a traumatic experience, don’t tell you what happened or how they’re feeling. They show you. They show you through behavior. We offer supports to providers where we will have someone go out and work with a provider to make sure that they can think through transitions and how their program is structured and what type of attention a child might need so that they can really help the child be successful in their program.

Anthony Codispoti: What directions, new directions is CCRC maybe headed in?

Donna Sneeringer: I think I’ve said a couple of times that we really are interested in holistic services for families. I think we’ve got a pretty fragmented system of support. We are really eager to expand our ability to make sure families get access to healthcare. As we’re providing them services and support for childcare, also making sure that they have access to health insurance or to medical services and support. One of the big issues with young children is developmental screenings to make sure the child is on track to develop at a typical pace. Making sure they get connected to developmental screening services.

We’ve been leading more and more into basic needs for families, diapers and food and clothing and just trying to as much as possible meet a family where they are when they come to our organization and wrap the services that we can to really help them succeed.

Anthony Codispoti: Give us more northern part of Los Angeles County which is the San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita Valley, Antelope Valley, Burbank and Glendale. Then we also serve San Bernardino County which is a pretty large geographic county in the country. Our service area is about 22,000 square miles so we have a pretty large territory that we cover. We partner then with our colleagues around the state and have sister agencies throughout California and across the country.

Anthony Codispoti: Somebody who’s listening that’s in one of those covered geographies that Donna just mentioned, you can find out more about their services and how to contact them at ccrcca.org. We’ll have that in the show notes but I want to make sure that you have it ccrcca.org. Donna, shifting gears a little bit. Would love to hear about a particular challenge that you personally have overcome whether it’s on the professional side or something more on the personal side and some lessons that you learned coming through that.

Donna Sneeringer: So you know I think when we started talking about how I got to the job that I’m in now, you know careers or journeys and we hit different milestones and pitfalls along the way, I think probably a big challenge that I faced was during the Great Recession, the organization that I was working for went through a lot of very difficult challenges and changes and I was pretty tired. I was doing public affairs at that point dealing with a lot of the reductions in services, dealing with media, dealing with local government and a lot of contract reductions and I kind of reached a burnout point where I just didn’t, I lost my way in the reason I was doing this work and I stepped away and went to do work with a friend who was doing environmental policy. So I stepped away completely kind of for a year but I kept some of my fingers in the early childhood space and it was not for me. It just was not a good fit and I ended up ending that position and was sort of between jobs, had a young kid of my own and really struggled to decide, well, do I try something totally new or do I need to go back to where my core is and where my values are and fortunately I had a long-standing relationship with the CEO at CCRC who we had stayed in communication when I had made that transition and I ended up with an opportunity to go back and it’s where I belong. This is the stuff I care about and I think it took about six weeks into being back to go, oh right, why did you leave?

What were you thinking? Because this, and I think I, as I mentioned, I have a degree in child development and I really thought I was advocating for kids but it was really during that time that I realized I was advocating for the parents because I was one and I was in it and I knew how hard it was and how hard it is to put all the pieces together when you’re trying to raise a family and we don’t make it so easy in the United States to be a family. We don’t put all the resources and supports in place. We’re very driven with economics and with success in that way and it’s very hard to be a parent and I think that that was a real moment of clarity for me where I really realized that the skills and talent I had were best used to try to lift that issue and to try to really make the system work better and make things better so people could really achieve the families that they wanted to have.

Anthony Codispoti: Donna, say more about what caused you to burn out and to leave the space for a little while.

Donna Sneeringer: You know, it’s very hard to have things that you really care about dismantled and I had to lay off employees. You know, those are very difficult decisions particularly with people you have a relationship with over years and then you know a lot of the services that we had been providing we had to end and there were a lot of families who were in a very difficult circumstance without the support that we had been offering and you feel like you failed that you couldn’t fight to keep it together and couldn’t make it work and so I do believe that you know in hindsight I don’t know that there’s anything that could have been done differently but at the time you just don’t feel like you can fix it and that’s a you know for an A student that’s a hard thing to that’s a hard thing to accept.

I usually feel like I’ve got my hands on the reins pretty solidly but when you know when when things got tough it was it was really difficult and I think it’s hard to live your life and not run into those patches and you learn a lot about yourself and you learn about what matters to you what you are willing to do and not do and I think that’s part of becoming wise older and wiser you know you you fall down and you get yourself back up and you start again but you know it’s always easier looking back than when you’re in the thick of it isn’t it?

Anthony Codispoti: And what did you learn that matters to you Donna?

Donna Sneeringer: I think that as I said it just really underscored to me that I really feel strongly that I want to use my skills and abilities to make other people’s lives better and that at the end of the day that’s where I want to invest my time to make sure that children have the best opportunity to succeed that their parents are able to give them what they want to and and we build strong communities. I think that that’s the most meaningful type of work in my life so that’s that’s why I do it.

Anthony Codispoti: I’d be curious I’m going to explain something I’ve gone through something I’ve seen a lot of other either business owners business leaders go through and that’s when you’re in that transitionary state between things it’s really sticky it’s really murky it’s really uncomfortable like I’ll speak for me personally my identity is largely attached right or wrong to the work that I do and so if I’m leaving one opportunity and I’m trying to figure out what the next one is I feel untethered I feel like a part of me is unknown or missing or you know waiting to be defined I see you nodding your head does this describe your experience as well?

Donna Sneeringer: I think so you know I think I’m knowing what I know about human development and child development transitions are the hardest things and I had a colleague who used to talk about an example of a trapeze that when you’re swinging out on the trapeze and you need to get to the next one you have to be brave enough to let go of the last one and that letting go of the old is scary.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s a good way to put it.

Donna Sneeringer: It’s scary you know at least you knew you had something there but it’s going away and you’ve got to move on to the next thing but it’s that in between where you do you feel untethered you feel nervous and unsure of yourself and you’re better for it once you get through that phase and the more times you do it the more you realize I’ve been through this before I could do this again I’ve been through this before but you know it’s it is an uncomfortable feeling.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah what’s um I’m kind of curious you guys your staff is pretty big size thousand what’d you say thousand 1300 yeah 1300 yeah um tight labor market for most folks that I talked to um I don’t know if that’s the case for the kinds of positions that you’re hiring what are some things that you guys have tried and found success with in terms of recruiting good folks and then once you find them holding on to them you know I

Donna Sneeringer: obviously is a tight labor market and we as a non-profit organization can’t be necessarily as competitive in salary as other entities can be. What I do find is we are so fortunate that there are many people who feel very committed to the work that we do and to the mission of our organization. We do our best to be as competitive as we can be with salary we do um do our best to try to offer competitive benefits um flexible workplace and you know are constantly striving to do better but at the end of the day um I think that most of our employees who are with us for long periods of time are really committed to the work and are able to earn a good living at the same time that they’re able to as I mentioned give back and try to do for others and I think that that’s a unique opportunity probably the area where we are stretched most thin in labor is in the actual teacher workforce because of the things I mentioned earlier um there just are not as many people going into the profession and getting an education in early learning and child development so we have been doing a lot of work around apprenticeships trying to find people who wouldn’t necessarily have gone straight to a four-year university wouldn’t necessarily have thought this at the beginning of their professional lives but start to you know identify that they’re interested in working with kids maybe they’ve had their own children and now they’re like oh well maybe this would be something I’d be interested in and then giving them a more attainable pathway through an apprenticeship model where they can work and get the training at the same time I would get I would guess we’re going to be doing more of that um you know in the areas where we need the most work workers is really that classroom teacher side home visitors um case managers who work with our families those entry-level positions and trying to you know craft those jobs to be as appealing as possible and then also getting out there and really trying to recruit um at the community colleges and even in a high school career technical education uh to identify folks who maybe didn’t realize this was a career they could do um and try to connect them in as as quickly as we can

Anthony Codispoti: what’s something you wish you could teach a younger version of yourself Donna it’s really obvious to you now but uh man it would have been good to know back then oh

Donna Sneeringer: you know I’ve never been

Anthony Codispoti: patient

Donna Sneeringer: I’m still waiting to learn that one too uh but I think if I could in hindsight if I had known when I was young that things do take time changing things takes time and you have to keep going back to things that are important to try to move them forward and it’s not going to happen all at once it’s just not realistic to think you’re going to get everything right the first time and that you’ve got to be willing to adapt and change and that it takes time yeah

Anthony Codispoti: uh any specific mentors or books that have helped shape your career are you

Donna Sneeringer: personally you know I I have been so fortunate uh to have a lot of wonderful mentors um in the in the field that I’m in um you know women who who set up a lot of these organizations that I had the chance to work with when I was in my 20s um you know who I saw as our founding mothers in many ways and I will say it’s a little daunting to now realize I’m one of them not one of the youngsters coming up but you know they they really blazed trails that were not there before and I I learned a lot from them I have a colleague who was a member of the state legislature in California and have worked closely with her for about 15 years and then some of my graduate school professors just wonderful mentors at USC and even at Cal State Northridge in the child development program there um they you know they they still keep roping me back in to mentor the next generation you know

Anthony Codispoti: so everybody takes a turn Donna everybody

Donna Sneeringer: takes a turn that’s right you know and I I actually really like that part of where I am in my life right now I really like mentoring young people um I like to see them succeed and really um I’m really enjoying that part of at this phase of my career it’s it’s really something to um you know I have young staff who started with me right out of college that are now um in committee assignments at the state legislature doing amazing work um you know leading organizations and really taking off in their own right and that’s pretty cool

Anthony Codispoti: what’s a fun or interesting thing that most people might not know about you it done something crazy of an interesting hobby

Donna Sneeringer: you know I I grew up um my dad was in the entertainment industry and I grew up around that he was an Emmy award winner uh so I grew up in Los Angeles around television stations and television production and um a lot of celebrities uh which was just sort of a strange surreal to me was normal but I think to other people um they would be surprised but I it’s in a lot of ways helped me in my life because I’m not easily phased by

Anthony Codispoti: you know get star struck or rattled or star struck I you know I don’t there are very few times I I can think of that I’ve been like oh

Donna Sneeringer: that’s really an important person because I I was around it enough to know that they were just people like everybody else so so that’s probably you know something people don’t know about my background I was probably one of the few elementary school kids who sat in remote trucks for sporting events um because my dad would take me along and I would sit and watch them produce sporting events so

Anthony Codispoti: was there ever any thought for you to get involved in that space

Donna Sneeringer: I started off as a radio television film major okay I did

Anthony Codispoti: and you decided that you found out that wasn’t for you

Donna Sneeringer: I I knew what it would take to be successful in that world and it just wasn’t a good fit for me at that time ironically I now talk to the media on the regular um I understand press we put press conferences on I still deal with um parts of that uh so I you know my deep down skills come up every so often but yeah I I did entertain it very early on but nonsense

Anthony Codispoti: Donna I’ve just got one more question for you but before I ask it I want to do two things if you like today’s content please hit the share like or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app Donna I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you what would that be

Donna Sneeringer: um I think if they go to our website um they can find my contact information there so it’s ccrcca.org and they can find me there

Anthony Codispoti: yep well be sure to put that in the show notes for everybody and last question I have for you Donna how do you see this whole space evolving in the next couple of years things that we haven’t talked about already what do you think maybe some of the big changes are that are coming

Donna Sneeringer: you know there’s a lot of uncertainty at this moment um we are a week and a half out from a national election uh new presidential administration new congress new a lot of new elected officials in the space um who I think will have their own opinions about what they think should happen in the space if anything I don’t think the need for child care is going to go away um I think that it is just a reality of our world and our economy and um I think that as we’re grappling with a nation as a nation we’re grappling with a declining birth rate and that has lots of long-term implications for our country and one of the things we need to consider is what are we doing to make it possible for folks who want to have a family to be able to do that and many of the projects and programs we work on are related to that and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out

Anthony Codispoti: well Donna I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today I’m grateful for it

Donna Sneeringer: and I really appreciate the opportunity and thank you so much for the invitation

Anthony Codispoti: folks that’s a wrap on another episode of the inspired stories podcast thanks for learning with us today