Beyond Tri-Share: What Child Care Cost-Sharing Can Look Like When Communities Lead

If you spend any time in child care policy circles, you’ve probably noticed that “tri-share” has become a bit of a lightning rod lately. Traditional tri-share models split the cost of child care tuition between the state, employers, and families. Supporters think of it as a pragmatic, bipartisan tool for reaching families who fall through the cracks of the child care subsidy system. Skeptics think the numbers don’t lie: after years of implementation, the overall reach is modest, the employer uptake is slow, and the effort hasn’t matched the impact. Both sides are arguing past each other, and while they do, families are still making impossible choices about how to work and care for their young children.

Strict tri-share programs struggle because the model was built for uniformity in a landscape that demands flexibility. Communities have been experimenting with designs that work for their employers, their families, and their local funding environments. What they’re learning is worth building on.

The skeptics are largely right about the challenges, but they’re drawing the wrong conclusion. Cost-sharing models can scale, but only if they’re built to do so. Here’s what we know from the work we are leading in Missouri through Child Care Works:

• Communities are essential leaders that need state structures to enable, not constrain, their efforts on the ground

• Cost-sharing models are an important answer to the question of how states can expand the pool of funding beyond what public dollars alone can provide

• State-local partnerships can decrease program administration costs, build on efforts aligned with other state priorities, and change the overall landscape of early childhood systems.

Recently, Linda Smith made a compelling case for shared-responsibility models by pointing to the Department of Defense’s Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood program. She’s right that MCCYN proves these models can scale, and the design conditions that make it work are worth studying closely. DoD is a single, centralized employer with a mission-readiness mandate and decades of integrated infrastructure, which most states don’t have. The takeaway from MCCYN, then, isn’t that every state needs its own federal-scale chassis. It’s that cost-sharing scales when the design conditions are right, and those conditions have to be built from the community up.

The real problem in tackling child care access and affordability gaps is that the traditional child care funding sources are inadequate. The largest federal funding tool for child care is the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG, also referred to as CCDF). CCDF subsidy is critical to increase access for low-income families. However, eligibility rules are set at the federal level, then narrowed further by states, and then narrowed again by whatever funding is actually available. This results in millions of families who are technically eligible still unable to get help because there is simply not enough money to reach them.

For families who can’t access subsidy (because their income clears their state’s eligibility threshold, there are no CCDF-subsidized seats available in their area, or their state has imposed a freeze or waitlist), states typically don’t have much else to offer. Those thresholds are lower than most people realize: while federal law allows states to serve families earning up to 85% of State Median Income (SMI), ten states set their eligibility cutoff at or below 50% of SMI, leaving out families who are far from wealthy but still don’t qualify for help.

In Missouri, families that earn more than 150% of the Federal Poverty Level (which is $40,980 for a family of three) do not receive any public financial assistance to help pay for infant and toddler care. This type of care is often the most expensive.

These gaps run too deep to be solved only from the top down, and COVID made that clear. When relief funding flooded the system, most states pushed dollars out quickly with little infrastructure to target them effectively or track their impact. There was a wide variation in how states deployed ARPA dollars, with limited ability to ensure funds reached the communities that needed them most. The result was a lot of money moving fast, without the local infrastructure to make it count, and without a sustainability plan to ensure families wouldn’t lose care later.

Solving local problems requires local knowledge and responsiveness. The organizations already embedded in communities running programs, building relationships, and seeing the gaps firsthand are best positioned to guide where resources go and how they are used. However, too often they lack the funding and structures to act on what they are best positioned to do: inform decisions and lead implementation on the ground in partnership with state leaders.

Ensuring access to affordable child care isn’t a problem that more federal or state dollars alone can fix anytime soon, and we can’t afford to wait for the level of investment it would take to solve it that way. Families certainly can’t wait. Community leaders know this and are already stepping up to solve the problems their neighbors face. Multi-stakeholder cost-sharing has to be a core part of every state’s strategy to find sustainable solutions to these challenges. Child care has long been viewed as a responsibility of state government, but states alone rarely have the capacity or the will to address it at the scale the problem demands. Collaborative partnerships with communities, employers, and philanthropic organizations don’t just expand what’s possible; they build the kind of locally-rooted infrastructure that’s more durable than anything a state can sustain on its own.

So, Why Hasn’t Tri-Share Scaled?

Across the states that have tried classic tri-share models, the reach has been limited. Michigan’s program has served about 1,000 children after nearly 5 years; North Carolina’s has served 46 children after 1.5 years, and Kentucky’s has served roughly 150 after 3 years. These are real families getting real help, but set against young-child populations in the hundreds of thousands, this is not scaling. It’s essential we question why, but the answers should lead to designing better models, not dismissing cost-sharing entirely.

My team’s analysis of existing tri-share models points to a few key design challenges:

• The administrative burden falls on the wrong people. In Kentucky, employers must initiate the enrollment process, which assumes they already know their employees need child care and understand the ROI of offering it as a benefit. That’s a big ask before they’ve even signed on.

• Unpredictable costs can deter employer participation. In Michigan, contributions are divided into thirds based on tuition costs, with strict income thresholds. As a result, employers have no reliable way to budget what the benefit will cost them month to month.

• Siloed infrastructures limit impact. Michigan’s regional hubs weren’t intentionally designed to align with other state-local partnership structures, which limits their reach and makes program administration more costly than it needs to be.

Iowa’s Childcare Solutions Fund has taken a different approach than most. Rather than linking cost-sharing to employer participation only, it pools public and private dollars at the community level and invests them directly into the supply side: provider wages, new slots, and workforce retention. A pilot across seven Iowa communities created 275 new child care openings in less than a year and helped retain or hire roughly 1,200 child care workers. The result is an investable system that builds supply, not just affordability, for the few families lucky enough to work for a participating employer. Denver (CO), New Orleans (LA), and Guildford County (NC) are just a few other examples of communities building local solutions to child care challenges. With the right support structures, these efforts can go even further and prove that communities will lead when given the tools to do it.

Missouri’s Child Care Works

Missouri’s answer to cost-sharing – Child Care Works (CCW) – builds a model that:

• Positions communities across Missouri as essential leaders, with state structures that enable rather than constrain their work on the ground;

• Captures revenue from employers and local funders to scale what state or federal dollars alone cannot; and

• Is intentionally designed to reduce administration costs and hassle, align with other state priorities, and meaningfully impact local child care landscapes and economies.

It starts at the local level. The most important design decision in any cost-sharing model is who is doing the day-to-day work of building relationships. Recruiting employers, raising philanthropic and local dollars, engaging families, supporting providers, and understanding local landscapes aren’t things that can be done at the state level. In Missouri, building the infrastructure for local organizations to administer multiple funding streams and lead the work on the ground was crucial. CCW community lead organizations know which employers are ready to engage, which providers need support, and where the gaps are. They’re also positioned to look across the broader local landscape, connecting the dots between supply-building initiatives, early childhood workforce efforts, and quality improvement work. By leveraging a statewide platform that acts as a one-stop shop for enrollment and payment management, CCW removes a big administrative lift for community lead organizations, so they can focus on what they do best. Communities must be empowered to solve their own problems in ways that respond to their unique context. The challenges facing rural and underserved areas in particular, are not going to be solved from a capital city. They require local leaders who know their communities, who are building relationships that can’t be replicated on a spreadsheet, and who have the ability and the resources to act on what they know.

In December 2025, CCW launched its first implementation year in seven communities across Missouri, and many others are planning to implement CCW local models in the near future.

It’s flexible by design. Child care funding rarely comes from a single source, and a program built around a single source will always face limitations on scale. In Missouri, the vast majority of child care is funded primarily by parent tuition. CCW builds the infrastructure for community lead organizations to bring a wide mix of dollars to the table: employer contributions, philanthropic investment, local funding, and more. In St. Louis, a “quadri-share” model brings together state, employer, family, and local philanthropic dollars, and the city is exploring a dedicated child care sales tax on top of that. Jefferson City is focused on recruiting local businesses and child care centers. CCW gives local leaders the platform to administer those resources and leverage a state match, so every local dollar goes further than it could on its own.

It reduces friction. A fixed three-way split between employer, employee, and a state funding source sounds simple, but in practice, it creates real barriers. Employers often can’t predict what their contribution will cost from month to month when it depends on tuition costs, and that unpredictability alone can be a dealbreaker. It also means that employees who earn too much to qualify for the subsidized third share are left out entirely. If large companies can’t offer the benefit to their full workforce, many simply won’t participate. CCW addresses this by building in additional cost-sharing options that allow employers to share costs with employees, regardless of whether they qualify for the tri-share program. When asked to participate in a cost-sharing model, employers are being asked to do something new. The programs that earn their participation are those that make it easy to say yes. Predictable costs, minimal administrative burden, and the ability to offer a meaningful benefit broadly are often the difference between a signed employer participation agreement and a passed opportunity.

How may this look like in practice for a Missouri employer in a metropolitan area?

Under a traditional tri-share model, only 20 employees would be eligible for financial support for care. With CCW, this small employer in a metropolitan area of the state could offer child care benefits to their entire staff, not just those eligible for CCW state funds, and receive a significant tax advantage for their investment.

The early numbers tell a different story than what we’ve seen elsewhere. Five months into implementation, more than 34 employers are participating in Child Care Works, and the majority of them are businesses, not child care providers. From a local telecommunications company and a community pharmacy to a global consumer goods company and a city government, these are employers choosing to invest in their workforce because the program made it easy to do so. Together, they’ve committed more than 160 seats reserved for employees to fill as they enroll, with over 50 already active. The pipeline is growing faster than the infrastructure, which is exactly the kind of problem worth having.

The incremental, pragmatic path

Cost-sharing isn’t a sweeping solution that will transform the child care sector overnight. It won’t fill supply deserts, replace sustained public investment, or reach every family that needs help, but the reality is, most states won’t pursue the approaches that would do those things. Cost-sharing is an incremental, pragmatic path, and in a landscape where transformational change keeps failing to arrive, incremental and durable doesn’t mean insufficient. It means buildable and scalable.

What’s too often missing from cost-sharing conversations is a clear answer to who leads. The designs that scale are those in which communities see themselves as leaders and change agents—the people closest to families and providers, equipped with the tools, funding flexibility, and decision-making latitude to design what actually works on the ground. And that kind of community leadership only holds up within a true state-to-local partnership, one built on bidirectional feedback loops where what’s learned locally shapes what’s built at the state level, and where state structures flex in response to what communities need to move forward. Without that two-way relationship, even the best-designed cost-sharing program defaults back to the same top-down model that has left families waiting.

When implemented well, cost-sharing can catalyze innovation and solution-building, creating a platform for communities to think through their own challenges and deploy resources in ways that actually match their needs. It builds the kind of resilient, locally-rooted infrastructure that can survive federal funding swings, fill gaps the state can’t see from a distance, and fund access to care where state dollars fall short.

In Missouri and across the country, families are making impossible choices in a system that was not designed with them in mind, and where unsubsidized child care costs rival mortgage and rent payments. State leaders in Missouri realize that cost-sharing isn’t flawless, but the model can work, it can grow, and the communities that need it most don’t have time for us to keep waiting for better.