Access to child care is essential for family well-being and economic stability. Yet many families in Georgia struggle to find and afford quality care that meets their needs.

Recognizing these challenges, Urban Institute has spent several years partnering with Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) to help the state better understand how its child care policies and investments affect families and child care providers, and how those policies and investments can be strengthened.

Urban has examined strategies to support child care outside traditional hours, an issue affecting an estimated 475,000 children in Georgia who need care during early mornings, evenings, or weekends. Urban’s recommendations helped inform practical solutions, from extending hours at existing providers to leveraging transportation and employer-supported care. Through DECAL’s EXPAND Grants, local communities have already delivered more than 28,000 hours of nontraditional, quality-rated child care in 2025, supporting parents whose work schedules fall outside standard business hours.

Urban’s work with DECAL is grounded in a sustained, mission-driven approach. Rather than one-off studies, the partnership has focused on answering the state’s most pressing questions at each stage.

Early in the partnership, Urban’s team helped DECAL understand the challenges facing families, providers, and agency staff under COVID-19, with a focus on how to best use federal COVID-relief funds. Since then, Urban has helped the state understand how families experience the child care subsidy system, how to strengthen early care and learning, and how to improve the child care quality rating system. Across projects, Urban has paired interviews of families, providers, and administrators with system-level analyses of subsidy use, supply constraints, and regulatory environments to ensure that findings translate into clear, actionable insights for state decisionmakers.

Currently, the team is wrapping up a statewide analysis of child care supply, including a deep dive on the local regulatory environment, and analyzing data collected from a major, multiyear study of families’ experiences navigating Georgia’s child care subsidy system.