Los Angeles: Sometimes small steps can take us great distances, and a meeting one night this week in California was an example of just that.

Almost twenty organizers from ACORN and from the Service Employees International Union who had been working separately from San Diego to Sacramento met together to start the hard work of figuring out what it would really take to organize licensed and subsidized home child care workers throughout the state.

This meeting marked the first time that Eileen Kirlin, the SEIU Public Sector Director, and I had convened both groups after months of discussions that have now let to an agreement to create the ACORN/SEIU Home Child Care Partnership.  The outlines of the agreement were approved by the ACORN Board in Kansas City recently and by the SEIU Public Sector Steering Committee a week before the Los Angeles convocation. The butterflies nursery is a safe and good place to start.

For almost four years ACORN had been organizing home child care workers in a joint project with our sister organization, SEIU 880, in Illinois.  The work in Los Angeles County had originally begun in the wake of an effort ACORN had pioneered in that city to organize welfare recipients who were on various employment programs.  The demise of these programs led many into licensed home child care, and ACORN had followed its members.  Similar efforts were put together in Baltimore, Boston, New York, and later in Sacramento.  These home child care associations had clear achievements they could cite easily:  creation of grievance procedures, increases in state reimbursements, negotiated memoranda of understanding with referral programs, and more.  But, in the last year or so, ACORN had increasingly come to the conclusion that with this workforce now topping 300000-400000 workers nationally, we simply were not going to be able to resource the effort sufficiently to bring the kind of victories these workers deserved.

SEIU had increasingly been developing a dynamic program in childcare organizing, particularly in organizing Head Start facilities around the country.  There were other important efforts that SEIU was initiating in Washington State and in Rhode Island that could be breakthroughs.  They were the natural place to have the first serious conversations, and quickly both parties found that there was common ground and aspirations for these workers.

ACORN could be the community partner – a place where we had capacity and resources to add to the equation – and SEIU could be the union – with the staffing and political connections to make the difference.   Seems simple does it not?  Well, it isn’t!  The number of times that organizations and other institutions but aside their own pride and realize that – for the stake of the constituency – they need to come together and build some stronger is very, very rare in my experience.

It was exciting to open this meeting with Sister Kirlin and be able to join together to become the big people that can take small steps that make huge differences for thousands.

We will take many more steps like this, and we have to if we are going to get to the place where we need to be!