Photo by: Visit Grand Junction
Photo by: Early Learning Connections
Child Care Made Visible is a community storytelling initiative that translates the real experiences of Colorado's child care workforce into large-scale community murals. Over the past several months, Empowered gathered stories from parents, home-based providers, advocates, and community partners across two Colorado communities — Grand Junction and Colorado Springs — capturing what early childhood education really looks like on the ground: the challenges families face, the providers who sustain it, and the advocates working to expand access.
These stories are now being brought to life as murals, created by artist Hilary Williams, installed at two host sites:
Grand Junction — at Colorado Baby, a baby boutique and motherhood retail store
Colorado Springs — at the Alice Bemis Taylor Center for Early Education, Early Learning Connections
Each mural is shaped directly by the storytellers themselves, making the human side of the child care visible in physical, public spaces within Mesa and El Paso counties.
The project is funded by Gary Community Ventures' Childcare Storytelling Initiative, GJ Creates along with community partners: Mesa County Partnership for Children and Families and Joint Initiatives.
At the heart of this project is storytelling.
Over the past several months, Empowered reached out to the parents, providers and businesses at ground zero for child care in Colorado Springs and Grand Junction to ask them to tell us their stories about the status of child care in their respective communities.
We heard from a mom who started a nonprofit to help military spouses navigate care beyond a surprisingly difficult system, a dad who works to inform developers about the high return on investment for including child care spaces in their projects, from home care providers who cross generations in their own businesses and in their clientele, from child care advocates who have rallied their communities to create larger spaces to serve more families, to add slots for infants, in downtowns and in ranching communities, and so much more.
7 Stories. 2 Communities.
1 Cause.
We are proud to present a collection of videos created from the cohorts of local storytellers that reflect the broad experience of early childhood education in Colorado Springs and Grand Junction: educators, parents, family child care providers, community partners, and voices from all walks of life.
Child Care Made Visible invites community members to join the conversation about where child care goes next and how it will affect our economy going forward.
Colorado Springs
El Paso County is home to more than 46,000 children under five, but has only 18,300 child care spots — a gap of roughly 16,000, according to Joint Initiatives for Youth + Families. Providers like Early Connections Learning Centers work daily to close it.
Grand Junction
Mesa County spans high-poverty urban areas and rural ranching communities, each with distinct child care needs — and as of 2021, Clifton, a city of about 20,000, had no full-day child care options. The Mesa County Partnership for Children and Families works to close these gaps county-wide.