My interest in child care started early, when I took care of infants in a child care center and did home visits with low-income Latino families in Austin, Texas. Those experiences allowed me to see firsthand the often heartbreaking challenges and trade-offs that low-income families face in trying to provide their children with a strong start. Subsequently, my passion has been to make our child care and early childhood systems work better for these families. I work to bring the complexities of real people’s lives to the policy debate and to translate them into pragmatic policy solutions that make sense for families as well as for the policymakers, practitioners, and service providers working on their behalf.