Madison LammertAppleton Post-Crescent
In the early morning hours one day last year, a Milwaukee dad was the only one in his house awake to witness a pivotal moment for Wisconsin families.
Graham Anderson watched via livestream as the state Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance discussed what child care measures should be included in the state budget.
It was a “tense night,” Anderson said.
Child Care Counts, a program credited with keeping thousands of child care businesses open, didn’t make the cut, meaning it was set to end in 2024. Anderson shared in the disappointment (later, the program got extended).
The marathon meeting yielded a big win: The committee voted to change Wisconsin Shares, the state’s child care subsidy program, so more families could get help.
Despite not being a legislator or having a background in early childhood education, the father of two spearheaded the Shares changes.
“It’s the ‘daycare dad goes to Madison’ kind of thing,” Anderson said. “At the beginning of this process, I didn’t know how to change legislation, but there was an opportunity to help make child care more affordable for families, so I decided to do something about it.”
Anderson's efforts yielded two major changes, which the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates could benefit roughly 1,700 families per year. Starting July 1, not only will more families be eligible for Wisconsin Shares, they'll also stand to lose fewer benefits as their incomes increase.
“Although it took half a decade,” Anderson said, “the end result is we got legislation passed in the state to really help these families.”
Making change from Africa to the home front
Anderson, who is a group manager of digital products at Milwaukee Tool, never envisioned becoming a leader in child care policy.
After some reflection, he said the path to this point was years in the making.
When he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a political science degree in 2011, Anderson wanted to work at the U.S. Department of State. Instead, he met a social entrepreneur and helped start Africa’s first Fair Trade Certified mass garment facility in Ghana.
“That experience is really what shaped and instilled in me the value that both organizations and individuals can play in the communities they live and operate within,” he said.
This lesson became a through line in all Anderson did, including biking across the country to build houses and raise money for Habitat for Humanity and joining many boards and initiatives dedicated to improving Wisconsinites’ lives.
One of these was the Greater Milwaukee Committee's MKE United initiative. Anderson was part of a team examining what roadblocks Wisconsinites faced to sustainable employment.
There, he learned of a phenomenon he found deeply unsettling: benefit cliffs.
Even if families earn just a tiny bit more, they might end up above the income eligibility cutoff for state assistance — and lose their benefits completely. If their benefits are decreased, not eliminated, they may find that the decrease outweighs their increased earnings.
As a dad who had two young child care, Anderson knew how expensive it could be. Even though he and his wife, Andrea, didn't use Wisconsin Shares, he quickly learned how its benefit cliff could put families across the state in precarious positions.
Families on Shares can face difficult choices. Anderson's changes strive to help.
Julie Kerksick, who was a senior policy advocate with the Community Advocates Public Policy Institute when working with Anderson on the project (she has since retired), helped design and implement anti-poverty policies. Throughout her career, she saw some families pass up promotions and raises, and even cut back work hours, to keep their safe child care. If their Shares payment decreased, or ceased altogether, they couldn’t afford it.
“Helping people stay in the labor market — and be better off as a result — is one of the big goals we set in our work," Kerksick said. "We do not believe that people should be economically worse off by staying in the workforce."
Essentially, the large loss of benefits associated with small increases in income acts as a disincentive for families to progress in their career fields and otherwise earn more over their lifetime. That can harm the state’s workforce, too, Anderson said.
“The choice between losing affordable child care or accepting a promotion, pay raise or more hours at work (that would) improve the outcomes of their families didn’t seem like the tradeoffs we should be asking working families in Wisconsin to make,” he said.
Getting involved: learning about policy and process
Something had to be done, Anderson thought. But before he could pinpoint any solutions, he had a lot to learn — both about the economics of anti-poverty policy and the legislative process.
To understand the economics of benefit cliffs, he enlisted the help of Tim Smeeding, an economist and professor emeritus at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Knowing of Kerksick's previous work, Anderson and the team enlisted her help too.
Then there were the politics. The Hoan Group, an independent nonprofit organization that connects Milwaukee and Madison thought leaders, knew a lobbyist could provide the road map Anderson needed. So it financed one.
“Graham had done all this work and was in the final stages, but he ran into another obstacle,” said Hoan Group cofounder Ian Abston. “We heard in his voice the frustration and struggle of trying to affect change as a person whose last name may not open doors.”
The best strategy, the lobbyist said, was to gather a broad swath of support. From there, the Wisconsin Benefits Cliff Coalition, which included businesses and community development organizations, was born.
Rep. Jessie Rodriguez, R-Oak Creek, said several groups in the early learning industry had been advocating for changes to Wisconsin Shares for years. Rodriguez successfully led charges for previous changes to the program intended to mitigate the cliff effect during the state's 2017-19 budget process, and the Wisconsin Benefits Cliff Coalition renewed her interest in furthering these efforts.
She said she became a strong advocate in the Legislature for the new Wisconsin Shares changes.
“One of the things that helped to make this change possible was the advocacy of the business community through the coalition,” she said. “Hearing that chambers of commerce and employers believed changes in the Wisconsin Shares program would help their employees continue to work helped me to garner support in the Legislature.”
Getting support in both parties may have seemed difficult, given the partisan divide over other potential child care policies. But Anderson said the reality was different.
“What I found is that every single legislator I worked with, regardless of the side of the aisle that I was working with, wanted to help make things better and problem-solve,” he said.
Related: Wisconsin's legislative session is wrapping up. What have lawmakers done on child care?
'Instead of jumping off a cliff, they can walk off a ramp'
Coalition members spoke to legislators, the economic experts ran the numbers, and, with Rodriguez' support, the team strategized what stood a chance at passing.
Ultimately, two main changes were baked into the state's budget as a result of Anderson's work.
The first addresses Wisconsin Shares’ benefit cliff. When a family’s income increases above 200% of the federal poverty level for its family size, there's a set copay increase.
Currently, a family’s copayment increases by $1 for every $3 they earn above 200% of the federal poverty level. Starting in July, their copayments instead will increase by $1 to every $5 earned above 200% of the federal poverty level.
Essentially, the copayment change makes the leadup to being kicked off the program less painful. As families earn more income, they won’t face as steep a decline in their Shares subsidy payments.
“We want to provide off-ramps to families,” Anderson said. “Instead of jumping off a cliff, they can walk down a ramp.”
Anderson’s efforts also expand the number of families who can qualify for Shares. Under the old system, a family could join Wisconsin Shares if their income was at or below 185% of the federal poverty level, a figure that fluctuated based on family size. But as of July, families can join if they earn 200% or less of the federal poverty level.
This change also addresses a flaw Anderson noticed in Shares’ structure. Currently, some families cannot start Shares, even though families of the same size and income are receiving Shares. For example, a family that earns 186% of the federal poverty level cannot join Shares. However, another family also making 186% of the federal poverty level might receive Shares, because it met the 185% threshold when it first qualified.
These changes will not fix all of the issues surrounding child care in the state, but they can make a big difference for Wisconsin families, Kerksick said. Citing Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates, Rodriguez said changing the eligibility threshold will help hundreds of families in the first year, and the copay change will help more than 1,200.
Ultimately, Kerksick said Anderson possessed one attribute in particular that pushed the changes over the finish line.
“It was his persistence and his efforts to keep people moving forward together, that I think is a wonderful lesson for everybody,” she said.
“We should never underestimate our individual ability to make a difference by getting involved.”
Kathryn Muchnick of the Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.
Madison Lammert covers child care and early education across Wisconsin as a Report for America corps memberbased at The Appleton Post-Crescent.To contact her, emailmlammert@gannett.comor call 920-993-7108.Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy withatax-deductible gift to Report for Americaby visitingpostcrescent.com/RFA.
