Category: Legislative Agenda & Advocacy Priorities

Voices & Choices for Children MN recognizes that the earliest and most critical policy interventions occur during the prenatal period and birth. To intercept racial disparities at their origin, we have significantly expanded our focus on maternal health.

We actively endorsed planning grants this session to support culturally responsive care models, arguing that increasing access to such care “interrupts the racial disparities in birth outcomes”. This includes supporting:

• SF 4992: A planning grant for an American Indian-focused Birth Center, designed to center traditional healing and cultural needs.

• SF 5171: Funding for planning an African American-focused Homeplace Model, which will provide perinatal care, lactation support, and nutrition education in a culturally safe space.

These legislative efforts position culturally responsive centers as essential public health infrastructure. Our “Prenatal to 8” mission means we view birth outcomes as the first educational and health milestone for a child.

Minnesota’s childcare system is complex and precarious. While we support permanent state and federal investments to transform the early care and education mixed delivery system, we must ensure that transformation truly meets the needs of all kinds of parents and children.

For Voices & Choices, advancing equity means recognizing and supporting care models that are often invisible to—or devalued by—traditional policy. That is why we are staunch supporters of efforts that includes and honors Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) care.

FFN care is a crucial equity stance. It is disproportionately utilized by immigrant and low-income families who rely on trusted networks and culturally specific support. If we are serious about achieving racial equity, we cannot impose a single standardized model; we must support the diverse forms of care that fully affirm cultural background, race, ability and experience.

A policy framework that fails to honor FFN care risks deepening the very equity gaps we are fighting to close.

The passage of the Community Solutions for Healthy Child Development Grant Program (CSF) is more than just a win for funding; it is a victory for structural change and co-governance.

Historically, funding for early childhood programs often adheres rigidly to “evidence-based practice” models. V&C has long argued that this approach systematically excludes small, BIPOC-led organizations because they lack the resources to generate Western academic “evidence”. This creates a cycle of exclusion. The CSF breaks this cycle by prioritizing community knowledge.

The most radical aspect of the CSF is the governance mechanism it codified. The legislation established a Community Solutions Advisory Council composed of community members with lived experience of racial inequities. This council is charged with reviewing applications and selecting grantees. This structure effectively transfers power away from state bureaucrats at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) directly to the community.

We are already seeing life-changing support for hundreds of Minnesotan families through funded projects like the Ninde Doula Program, Roots Birth Center, and efforts focused on Indigenous language immersion. This is proof that solutions for significant challenges should come from communities closest to those challenges.

As the legislative session kicks off, the Voices & Choices for Children Coalition is proud to release our 2023 Legislative Agenda. Our mission is clear: to shape more equitable practices and policies that will support better outcomes for children of color and American Indian children prenatal to 8 years old across Minnesota. We fundamentally believe that people of color and American Indians must be at the table as policies are created and decisions are made about and for our children.

Our work is grounded in a rigorous, codified definition of racial equity. In the policy environment, we insist that success must be measured by a technical standard: Racial equity is the condition that would be achieved if one’s racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares in society. This scope includes the elimination of not only unequal policies and practices, but also attitudes and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race.

Our LEAD priority this year is the Community Solutions for Healthy Child Development Grant Program. V&C worked with many stakeholders to advocate for the creation of this grant program. We know that communities closest to the problems are also closest to the solutions but are furthest from the resources. Fully funding and making this program permanent is essential to transferring decision-making power where it belongs.