Stronger Together
A DCELC Initiative for Collective Leadership in Early Childhood Education
In May 2026, more than 70 early childhood leaders, educators, and advocates gathered for Stronger Together: Protecting Progress Through Collective Leadership — a convening born from a simple but urgent recognition: Washington, DC's early childhood education field is strongest when it moves as one.
That single gathering is now becoming something bigger. Stronger Together is DCELC's ongoing initiative to protect progress in DC's early childhood field through collective leadership.
Leadership doesn't happen by accident. It has to be cultivated, trained, and resourced.
Watch the May 2026 convening recap
The Backbone of ECE as a Public Good
Stronger Together is the connective infrastructure of the “ECE as a Public Good” campaign. Its convening, leadership programming, and communications platform bring ECE directors, practitioners, and City leaders into a shared, data-informed narrative on treating early learning as an essential, equitably financed public good.
Convening
Bringing ECE directors, practitioners, and City leaders together in shared spaces to align around a common, data-informed narrative for the field.
Leadership Programming
Practitioners who move through Stronger Together become messengers and validators for the affordability, accessibility, and quality case DCELC makes to City leaders.
Communications Platform
Advancing non-lobbying policy education and public awareness that reframes early learning as an essential, equitably financed public good.
Reinforcing, Not Competing
Leadership development and public advocacy reinforce rather than compete for capacity — every educator equipped through Stronger Together strengthens the campaign's voice with City leaders.
Coherence Across a Fragmented System
This strengthens coherence and alignment across DC's fragmented, mixed-delivery ECE ecosystem — child development homes, centers, schools, and community organizations moving in the same direction.
Why This Work
Matters
Progress in ECE has always depended on people willing to lead — to testify, to organize, to speak up for children, families, and the workforce.
But leadership is not a trait some people have and others don't. It's a capacity that grows when it's invested in.
Too often, the field has asked its educators and providers to lead without ever building the pipeline, training, or support structure to help them do it well or sustain it over time.
Where the field has often relied on episodic collaboration, coming together during a budget crisis, a subsidy rate fight, or a licensing change, then dispersing once the moment passes, Stronger Together builds the leadership base that holds between those moments, so protecting progress isn't dependent on a handful of the same people carrying the field forward again and again.
DC's early childhood sector includes hundreds of family child care providers, center-based programs, and community organizations, each carrying deep expertise and a shared stake in the systems that shape their work, including subsidy reimbursement, pay equity, facility standards, workforce development, and public investment in the Birth-to-Three continuum. But that expertise is too often scattered.
Sustained progress depends on a deep, growing bench of leaders across every level of the field, including classroom educators, family child care providers, center directors, and association staff, with the skills, confidence, and support to carry the work forward.
The Campaign
ECE as a Public Good
The public-facing campaign that Stronger Together powers — reframing early childhood education as essential to Washington, DC's future, with the data, stories, and strategies behind the case for an equitably financed public good.
Stay Tuned.
Cohort tracks, leadership pathways, training opportunities, and how to get involved — announced soon.