The Long Game: MLICCI’s Child Care Advocacy Offers Lessons for the Nation

For more than two decades, the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative (MLICCI) has worked alongside child care providers, working mothers and families to make Mississippi’s child care system work better for the people it is supposed to serve. Now, that work is being highlighted as a model for advocates across the country.

A new report from Share Our Strength, The Long Game: Aligning Systems and Practices with the Families They Serve, examines MLICCI’s decades-long advocacy and the lessons it offers organizations working to advance family economic mobility nationwide. The report describes MLICCI’s work as an example of sustained advocacy that combines research, lived experience, coalition building and an understanding of how policy decisions are actually made.

The report also documents just how high the stakes have become for Mississippi families. Following the expiration of pandemic-era child care funding, 41% of providers surveyed by MLICCI reported that parents had to quit working after losing access to subsidies, while 30% reported parents leaving education or training programs. By December 2025, Mississippi's publicly reported Child Care Payment Program waiting list had reached 19,390 families.

But The Long Game is also a story about what persistent advocacy can accomplish.

The report highlights MLICCI's nearly two-decade effort to eliminate Mississippi's child support enforcement requirement for accessing child care assistance. That policy created significant administrative and, in some cases, safety barriers for mothers seeking assistance. Its repeal in 2023 immediately made an additional 17,500 children eligible for child care subsidies.

More recently, MLICCI consistently advocated for Mississippi to use TANF direct spending to supplement Child Care Payment Program funding. In May 2026, the Mississippi Department of Human Services announced a $5 million TANF pilot using the approach MLICCI had advocated.

These victories did not happen overnight, and certainly did not happen in a vaccum.

The report identifies four lessons from MLICCI's experience for advocates who are committed to the "long game": know the lay of the land, build the case, build strategic coalitions, and maintain persistence while adapting strategy. It also emphasizes MLICCI's practice of grounding policy advocacy in the lived experiences of parents and child care providers—not simply speaking for families, but helping ensure their experiences shape the policies that affect them. This approach remains central to our work today.

Child care is not a luxury. It is essential infrastructure that allows parents to work, pursue education and training, strengthen their economic security and provide for their children. Mississippi has made progress, but thousands of families still need access to affordable, reliable child care.

We are proud that MLICCI's work is helping inform a national conversation. More importantly, we remain committed to the work ahead.

Because lasting change requires more than winning one policy fight. It requires staying in the fight long enough to change the system.