Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative

Background

The Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative was founded in November 2001 as a tax-exempt charitable advocacy organization in Biloxi, Mississippi by Carol Burnett, the executive director of the Moore Community House, a local organization focused on child-care and occupational-training programs for single mothers, in order to address a perceived lack of affordable childcare for working mothers and insufficiency of existing federal and state assistance programs. ^{2 1 3}

Policy

The Mississippi Low-Income Child-Care Initiative advocates for policies in the state of Mississippi related to the eligibility of parents for access to as well as the budget and regulations of childcare assistance programs. For instance, the organization engages in advocacy focused on the State of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services Child Care Payment Program (CCPP), a subsidy initiative that provides vouchers to eligible parents to offset the tuition costs of participating childcare programs. The organization supports implementing presumptive eligibility, eliminating co-pays for families with incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty guideline, eliminating the requirement that parents participate in the program’s quality rating system, allowing parents to use the same documentation for determining eligibility for younger children as they would for children aged 13 to 19, and offering categorical eligibility to certain groups of program-eligible parents for related workforce development and training programs (for instance, single mothers enrolled in community college programs). ^{4 5}

The organization also has advocated in support of changes to Mississippi’s administration of federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) grant funding, including “drastically” increasing the program’s cash assistance caseload, prioritizing spending on childcare, investing in programs modeled to enrich impoverished families rather than fix problems with the state’s foster care program, eliminating the program’s drug testing requirements, and eliminating mandatory job-search requirements from program applications. ⁶

Funding

The Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative has received financial support from a variety of left-of-center organizations as well as government entities, including the Ford Foundation, Mississippi Department of Human Services, and Share Our Strength in partnership with the Albertsons Companies Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation. ^{7 8 9}

Leadership

Carol Burnett is the founder and as of 2025 was the executive director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. At that time, he was also the executive director of the Moore Community House, an aligned organization that provides child-care and job-training programs to poor single mothers in Biloxi, Mississippi. Previously, Burnett was the federal child care administrator at the Mississippi Department of Human Services, an NGO delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, participant at the White House Summit on Working Families during the Obama administration, and an employee with the Center for American Progress’s Faith and Reproductive Justice Institute. Additionally, Burnett is a United Methodist minister. ³

As of 2025, Roberta Avila was the child care leadership team coordinator at the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative as well as a board officer of El Pueblo. Previously, she was the director of the Early Head Start Program for Moore Community House, executive director of the Mississippi Coast Interfaith Disaster Task Force, executive director of the Steps Coalition, and racial healing practitioner with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation America Healing Convenings. ¹⁰

As of 2025, Nsombi Lambbright was the president of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative’s board of directors as well as the executive director of One Voice. Previously, she was the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. ^{11 12}