MANSFIELD — No children were crying in the room. But that vision, how to take care of a toddler while working, was the reason for Tuesday’s It Takes a Village capstone event at The Ohio State University Mansfield.
Child care providers, employers, policymakers and community leaders gathered at Ovalwood Hall for a conversation about child care challenges in north central Ohio — and the role each can play in addressing the issue.
Source Media Properties hosted the event in partnership with Groundwork Ohio and the Richland County Foundation’s Women’s Fund as part of It Takes a Village: Why child care is everyone’s business, a reporting project examining child care access, affordability and quality across the region.
“I hope everyone leaves with a better understanding of how child care challenges are impacting people’s everyday lives and our community as a whole,” Serrao said. “Child care challenges don’t exist in isolation. They impact our schools, our workforce, our economy and our future.”
A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report estimates insufficient child care costs Ohio’s economy $5.48 billion annually.
That includes an estimated $3.97 billion employers lose annually because of child care-related employee turnover and absenteeism, along with $1.52 billion in lost state tax revenue.
The report also found 70 percent of parents with young children had missed work or class at least once during the previous three months because of child care.
Ellington Serrao said she hoped putting people with different experiences and perspectives in the same room would lead to greater understanding — and eventually action.
“I would love to see these conversations lead to more empathy and community collaboration to support children and families,” she said.
A statewide conversation comes to Mansfield
The Mansfield gathering was also a stop on Groundwork Ohio’s 2026 Roadshow, an effort to hear directly from people whose lives and work intersect with children from birth to age 5.
Groundwork Ohio Vice President Brittany Boulton said the nonpartisan organization works with state policymakers and the governor’s administration to advance policies benefiting young children and their families.
But Boulton said that work needs to be informed by what is happening outside Columbus.
“We think that it’s really important for us to hear from folks on the ground who are doing that work,” she said.
Mansfield was the sixth of more than 30 planned stops for Groundwork Ohio. The organization travels to all 33 Ohio Senate districts from August through November.
The tour includes visits to child care centers as well as roundtable discussions with employers, chambers of commerce, local policymakers and philanthropic leaders. Groundwork Ohio is also holding community forums like the one in Mansfield.
The organization conducted a dozen similar events around Ohio in 2024, and what they learned helped shape their current policy agenda.
Boulton said the timing of this year’s tour is intentional.
“Candidates are out there campaigning,” she said. “We don’t take stances on candidates, but we do take stances on what’s right for kids.”
Richland Source, Ashland Source and Knox Pages spent more than 14 months examining child care challenges through It Takes a Village.
The project has produced 45 original articles representing more than 450 hours of work. More than 34,000 individual readers have spent a combined 700-plus hours reading the coverage.
The newsrooms also surveyed more than 1,000 parents, employers and child care workers about their experiences.
The reporting has focused on three interconnected challenges: access, affordability and quality. It also includes solutions journalism stories focused on innovative responses.
‘It’s not just one sector’
Community foundations across north central Ohio have already spent years studying the region’s child care challenges and considering potential solutions.
Lisa Lloyd of the Knox County Foundation said Tuesday’s discussion reinforced how much opportunity remains for collaboration among different parts of a community.
“There are just a lot of opportunities that are unexplored in our area right now,” Lloyd said.
She pointed to potential partnerships among businesses, nonprofits and other community organizations as one path toward addressing the crisis.
Kristin Aspin of the Ashland County Community Foundation said she has also noticed a change in the conversation surrounding child care over the past several years.
What once seemed like an issue affecting particular groups of people is increasingly being recognized as something affecting entire communities, she said.
Aspin said she was encouraged to hear that understanding reflected among participants Tuesday.
“It’s not just one sector that needs to solve this problem,” she said.
Instead, Aspin said communities need to bring people with different perspectives to the same table, recognizing that the solution that works in one place may not necessarily work somewhere else.
For Boulton, getting people to recognize their own stake in the issue is one of the goals of Groundwork Ohio’s tour.
“I would hope that they felt that they have a stake in the outcomes of young children’s well-being in Ohio,” she said.
She also hopes participants continue those conversations with the people representing them at the Statehouse.
“Policymakers really want to hear from the folks that live in their districts,” Boulton said. “It’s really important that everybody in this room does continue the conversation with the folks who represent them in our Statehouse and make sure that they continue to keep kids number one.”
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Policymakers hear from those closest to the issue
State Rep. Marilyn John participated in discussions Tuesday alongside a parent and a grandmother caring for her grandchildren.
She said conversations outside the Statehouse can give legislators an understanding they aren’t always able to get from hearings and committee meetings.
“I’m not an expert in everything,” John said. “Hearing from people who are on the ground every day and what they face — I learned things that I wouldn’t have known sitting in Columbus in a committee.”
John said hearing those perspectives reinforced the importance of supporting the people providing care.
“If we take care of our child care providers, they are more ready to take care of our children,” she said. “They’re better equipped to take care of our children, so what can we do to support them?”
John believes many answers will ultimately be developed closer to home.
“Issues are solved much better in communities than in Columbus,” she said.
‘We have to solve it’
For Scott King, president and CEO of Gorman-Rupp Company, one of the most striking lessons Tuesday was the complexity of the problem itself.
King said he was surprised to learn that some child care centers have physical space for additional children but can’t enroll them because they don’t have enough employees.
Digging deeper only revealed another layer of the challenge.
“It sounds like it’s a wage challenge, and then when you dig into it further, the parents are all saying they can’t afford this,” King said. “And so it’s a very, very complex problem.”
It’s a tension that encapsulates much of the child care challenge: providers need workers, workers need adequate wages and families are already struggling to afford the cost of care.
But King didn’t see the complexity of the problem as a reason to stop looking for answers.
“We have to solve it,” he said. “We don’t have a choice.
“We can do hard things.”
