“To What End?” - Q & A with King County Coalition Coordinator, Laurie Bohm

The King County Early Learning Coalition is in the process of rethinking and reworking their structure to better serve and represent their community. King County is one of the most densely populated and diverse counties in Washington, making this no small feat. Learn more about the coalition’s restructuring process, and the important work they are doing to support parents and families below.

What positive change(s) is your Network trying to enact locally?

Right now, we are trying to rethink the coalition in a very intentional and accessible way, especially for people of different races, cultures, and socioeconomic realities. We want to ensure that our membership encompasses the breadth of perspectives here in King County; from rural environments to suburban to high-density urban areas, from informal Family, Friend, and Neighbor care and licensed child care providers to culturally-based organizations to healthcare and government. I was recently telling someone this and they said, “To what end?”’ It’s because we cannot make effective change alone. If we are making big changes, we have to be really careful about unintended consequences, leaving people behind, and uninformed decision-making. That’s how it’s been done in the past, and it hasn’t worked. We’ll probably never meet everyone’s needs the way they want or need, but we can definitely center those who have been historically marginalized and do better. So we have to build our structure and decision-making to reflect this. We just had a coalition retreat to start setting this foundation, and it’s very exciting to see the intentionality and connections that are already happening. The more we can connect beyond our usual partners, the more we can make innovative and powerful changes that can help transform our early learning systems.

How are you implementing these changes?

We just hired a new Coalition Coordinator who will be starting in August, and that’s going to help this work have the focus it needs. We’ll be doing a lot of outreach and relationship-building, priority-setting, and foundational work as collaboratively as possible. We want to build a community where we can navigate together through differences, and that takes a lot of purposeful facilitation, processes, and structures. We have to do that first so we can get to purpose-driven action that everyone feels ownership of and invested in.

What can others learn from you?

We’re still learning from others, so come be part of the process and learn with us! We are a work in progress and it should probably always be that way. Even if you think you’ve figured something out, it’s probably still not working for someone.

How can others get involved?

Our coalition meetings are currently held virtually on the 4th Monday of the month from 9:30-11:00 a.m. You can contact me at bohm@childcare.org to get the calendar invitation and the coalition’s email updates.