New Mexico's Free Universal Childcare and the Grassroots Movement that Delivered it

FEATURING ANDREA SERRANO - The state of New Mexico just adopted a universal free childcare program, becoming the first state in the nation to do so. 

For decades now, the cost of childcare as a fraction of people’s wages has continued to increase, leading to more women dropping out of the workforce and people who want to have children, choosing not to in order to make ends meet. At the same time, childcare provider wages dropped to among the lowest in the nation. 

Progressives have been calling on government to step in and make free, publicly funded childcare available to all parents for years and were told such a thing was simply untenable. So, how did New Mexico make it happen?

Andrea Serrano is  a life long New Mexican who has worked in social justice and advocacy for over 25 years. She began working at OLÉ in 2012 as a community organizer and became executive director in 2017, leading the organization’s electoral and political organizing. Andrea is also co-chair of the Working Families Party National Committee. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the movement that led to NM's childcare success story.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I understand that the news and the announcement was around New Mexico making childcare freely available to people regardless of income, meaning for everyone in New Mexico, but that is not something that came out of nowhere, right? It's been building for a few years and state government has been making the net wider and wider for people to the point now where basically anybody who is a parent in New Mexico can have free childcare provided by the government. Is that accurate? 

Andrea Serrano: That's that is accurate. There are no income requirements for childcare assistance in the state of New Mexico, effectively creating universal childcare. 

Kolhatkar: So take us through the steps of how it happened. you know, we can go back to 2022. You can go back even further than that. How did it all begin? It started out with New Mexico basically being one of the worst, if not the worst states in the nation when it came to childcare, right? 

Serrano: Yes, for years New Mexico teetered between 48th, 49th and 50th in the state for child wellbeing. And in 2010, the idea to offer universal childcare came out of advocates including OLÉ, who, you know, really started to look at the state's funds come that come from oil and gas production.