What to Know before You Get Involved
Here are five questions to answer that will help you become a child care advocate:
- What do I want to see changed or improved? Our personal experiences are what motivate us to advocate for system change. Take some time to think about your experiences with child care and how they have impacted your life. Be sure to think about positive experiences as well as any challenging experiences. Based on those experiences, how would you like to see child care improved? How does your passion for the future connect with your past or present experiences?
- Who represents me? It only takes a couple of minutes to identify your legislative representatives. Here are some links to help:
- At the state level: https://akleg.gov/index.php
- Go to the “Who Represents Me?” bubble at the lower right-hand corner of the page.
- Type in your full address.
- Names and photos of your state representative and state senator will be displayed.
- Click on their photos to see more details.
- At the federal level: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
- Type your full address.
- Names and photos of the Alaska Congressional Delegation – two US Senators and a US Representative – will be displayed.
- Click on their photos to see more details.
- How do I track a bill? Once a bill has been assigned a number, there are several ways you can track its progress through the legislative process.
- At the state level: https://akleg.gov/index.php
- Scroll to the bottom of the webpage and sign-up for text updates using the bill number. OR
- Type the bill number in the search box at the top to see the bill’s current status and any documents associated with it.
- At the federal level: https://www.congress.gov/
- Type the bill number in the search box at the top to see the bill’s current status.
- There are also several non-governmental trackers that will help you stay current on federal legislation, such as https://www.govtrack.us/.
- Where do I learn more about the research behind child care? There are some excellent resources available to help you learn more about child care and early education. We’ve created a resource page (give link) with current research, articles, and one-pagers to help get you started, as well as additional links so you can continue researching on your own.
- How do I engage in advocacy? We created this toolkit to help answer that question. Let’s dig in and get you started on your advocacy journey.
