A Message from leadership
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This month’s update from Director Alyssa Chatterjee
Greetings! Legislative session has wrapped up, cherry blossoms are in bloom, and we’re already thinking about next biennium. Here are some things that are top of mind for me:
2026 Legislative Session
The Legislative Session concluded with a bang! DELC received an additional $67 million in Federal Fund limitation – basically, permission – to use more of our Child Care and Development Funds (CCDF) to help address the budget needs of the Employment Related Day Care (ERDC) program. This allows us to use more federal funds to close our projected budget gap for the program, if needed. We did receive a small reduction to our internal operating budget called Services and Supplies, or “S&S,” which pays for things like travel and trainings for DELC staff that should be absorbable for this biennium. Please keep an eye out for additional government affairs updates as we move into 2027 planning. We appreciate your partnership and support this past session!
Agency Request Budget
As I mentioned in my last Chats, when one session ends, another begins. While we are not quite halfway through the 2025-2027 biennium, DELC is already starting to plan for the 2027 legislative session that will set next biennium’s budget. As we’ve been hearing, we continue to head into a more constrained budget environment, which means you likely won’t see a lot of big-ticket budget requests coming from agencies unless we can find a way to pay for them. However, it’s important that we still engage our communities – including you all – in the development of our Agency Request Budget (ARB) so that we can more fully understand the needs of our system. Read on for more information about our ARB Prep Webinar on April 14th; your input is critical in these early stages of the process.
Recognizing the Early Years
I can’t sign off without mentioning that April is home to both the Week of the Young Child (April 11-17) and National Home Visiting Week (April 20-24)! This is the 55th anniversary of WOYC, and the second annual Home Visiting Week. I am excited to see the continued recognition of the importance of these early years alongside the critical workforces that support children and families across Oregon. Read on to learn more about this recognition and how you can celebrate alongside us at DELC.
Carey’s Corner: What Am I Reading
We are excited to see the news that the third and final installment of the Oregon Child Care Infrastructure Fund (CCIF) were awarded by Business Oregon this month, highlighted in this Oregon Capital Chronicle article. Since fall 2024, more than 180 child care infrastructure projects in every Oregon county and eight federally recognized tribal nations have received a portion of the $50 million fund. Funds awarded are designed to establish, expand, and improve child care facilities across Oregon. Across these three rounds of funding, almost 2,000 applications were submitted, requesting approximately $820 million. The strengths this fund is building, the demand it documented, along with two 2025 reports – First Children’s Finance’s Navigating the Early Years: Recommendations to Support Oregon Child Care Businesses in the Critical Years after Launch, and the Northwest Native Chamber’s Tribal Child Care Needs Assessment that included insights on the CCIF process – are efforts bringing insights to child care access and affordability issues facing our state.
On the national level, the National Children’s Facilities Network and the Reinvestment Fund released an analysis in 2022 describing findings from their mapping project of financial infrastructure that can support start-up funding to create new child care programs, working capital for business stabilization and maintenance, and growth capital for facility expansion and quality improvement. In addition, the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), a community development financial institution, ran a three-part blog series in Spring of 2025 showcasing innovative state strategies to fund early care and education (ECE) infrastructure and improve child care accessibility and affordability. Part 2 of the series highlights how California and Washington, D.C. leverage flexible capital to increase the supply and enhance the quality of child care. Their approaches are especially impactful for underbanked communities and undercapitalized ECE providers, where access to quality ECE services and capital is most limited.