2026 CDS Annual Conference

Child care is the backbone of the workforce, enabling the economy to function. The Recruit, Inspire, Support the Early Childhood Profession in Missouri (RISE-MO) project focused on improving the child care ecosystem in Missouri. This project focused on building supports to recruit and maintain the early child care workforce across the state. This project brought the business community into the conversation through a series of data briefs, webinars, Strategic Doing workshops and an employer toolkit. While businesses and educators both value quality child care, they often speak different languages, leading to miscommunication. This project built bridges between these communities.

Local stakeholders in Dublin-Laurens County, Georgia have identified access to quality childcare as a challenge within the community. Additionally, a discrepancy between the services offered by childcare programs and the needs of families and community employers exists. Through UGA’s Archway Partnership and the Mary Frances Early College of Education, a formal needs assessment was conducted to help aid the Chamber Community Foundation in strategically focusing their efforts to make improvements. In this presentation we will share findings from that needs assessment and takeaways for other communities dealing with similar challenges. 



 

Since 2025 legislative cuts to childcare benefits, state residents have been facing significant challenges securing high-quality childcare, impacting their participation in the workforce and family quality of life. This presentation will address some of the issues facing childcare industries and communities - and what our university’s Community Childcare Team is doing to overcome these challenges. We will specifically focus on ways our university is forging regional partnerships to create solutions that fit local needs through creative cooperatives and funding collaborations. In addition to our state-specific data, the presentation will share a U.S. map of each state’s overall childcare national score.

Public parks are often treated as either “accessible” or “not accessible,” yet community members experience access as uneven, incremental, and shaped by local capacity, terrain, maintenance, and design tradeoffs across disability needs. As communities navigate change together, parks function as shared infrastructure where equity goals meet real constraints, and where cross-sector partnerships determine whether inclusion becomes durable or merely symbolic. Our paper develops a typology for grading park accessibility on a spectrum, translating accessibility from a compliance frame into a practical community development tool for assessment, prioritization, and accountability.


Building on prior research on disability access initiatives in public parks, the typology organizes accessibility into key domains that reflect both the built environment and institutional practice: arrival and entry (parking, connections, gates), mobility and navigation (routes, surfaces, slopes), facilities and amenities (restrooms, seating, shade, play features), communication and wayfinding (signage, maps, sensory information), and programmatic inclusion (adaptive programming, staff capacity, policies, and partnerships). Rather than producing a single designation, our framework assigns parks to graded tiers along an accessibility continuum, distinguishing minimal compliance from meaningful inclusion. The typology also incorporates an equity context layer, recognizing that rurality, fiscal constraints, and maintenance volatility can erode accessibility over time even when infrastructure exists.

LANDBACK, Federal Indian Policy, and Examples of Indigenous Community Development Practice in the United States
LANDBACK is a community-led movement and political framework that seeks collective liberation for Peoples of Color and the returning of all stolen lands to Tribal Nations. Strengthening community connections is one way that this movement has gained traction, coalescing individuals and organizations from both the public and private sectors around these goals. Yet, Federal Indian Policy laws and regulations often create barriers to LANDBACK initiatives and other aspects of Indigenous life in the United States. This presentation will discuss the LANDBACK movement, Federal Indian Policy barriers, and recent community development successes that work towards LANDBACK initiatives through case studies.

This presentation shares findings from a quantitative evaluation of two urban community leadership programs. It examines how participants across demographic groups experienced leadership growth, civic engagement, and community empowerment. The analysis highlights strengths, disparities, and cross-sector collaboration strategies that shape community capacity-building efforts. Attendees will gain insight into how leadership development initiatives can promote equitable participation, strengthen community assets, and support sustainable social change.