Real-Time Data: A Boon for Quick Action and Community Leadership

With the early childhood education situation changing on a near-daily basis at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, ECE organizations of all kinds – federal, state, public, and private – scrambled to respond. We here at Early Learning Ventures (ELV) scrambled as well.

However, while many organizations spent valuable time searching for the data on which providers were staying open or had shut down, ELV, a shared services alliance, had this data and much more readily available at our fingertips thanks to Alliance CORE, our hub-based child care management system.

By pulling the data of all of ELV’s Colorado providers, we gained valuable point-in-time information including:

• Exactly which of our providers were staying open versus closing
• Just under 50% of Colorado providers in the ECE network chose to remain open
• Child attendance quickly fell to just under 20% of the historical CORE average
• As child care programs closed, we referred individuals to open child care programs with availability

Real-time data allows organizations and industries to move quicker. Had all providers in Colorado been on Alliance CORE or a similar hub-based attendance system, the additional time and money spent on building structures to capture this information could have been directed elsewhere.

Meanwhile, ELV had the data and was able to move straight to actionable help for our communities, including:

• Starting an ECE-specific webinar series anchored by expert guest speakers to address immediate COVID-19-related concerns
  • First webinar held April 3^rd and discussed the PPP and EIDL loans to almost 500 registrants
  • Subsequent webinars have been held each Friday on a variety of subjects
• Supporting the state of Colorado Emergency Child Care Collaborative by pushing all open ELV providers to them and navigating those providers through the Collaborative process to ensure timely payments
• Covering over $25,000 in Alliance CORE fees and offering the ELV Resource Platform for free to all Colorado residents throughout the rest of 2020
• Applying for and winning various community- and state-level grants to distribute to the ELV providers in most need