What strategies should North Carolina deploy, and in which communities, to increase child care access?

The Governor's Office and the NC Division of Child Development and Early Education are seeking one independent evaluation partner to design and carry out a unified evaluation of two rural child care pilots. The work will examine what each model accomplishes, at what cost, and under what conditions. The selected partner will establish common measures before implementation where feasible, monitor outcomes and implementation across six rural communities, integrate findings from a separate statewide family survey, and translate the evidence into practical recommendations for future state investment. For further details, see the full project scope (PDF).

North Carolina is preparing to test two complementary approaches to expanding rural child care access. The Rural Child Care Business Sustainability Pilot will work in approximately three communities to strengthen existing providers through child care management technology, standardized business coaching, and operational capacity grants. The Family Child Care Home Direct Support Pilot, established by Session Law 2026-41, will work through three Councils of Governments in the Coastal Plain, Piedmont, and Mountain regions. It will focus on creating new family child care homes through recruitment, startup assistance, technology and substitute-teacher supports, and ongoing mentorship. A separately procured statewide survey will gather families' child care needs, preferences, current arrangements, and barriers to care, with intentional oversampling in the six pilot communities.

The evaluation will help North Carolina decide when to strengthen existing child care supply, when to create new supply, and when to combine both approaches. Findings should support decisions about implementation, cost-effectiveness, and statewide scale. The final analysis must distinguish causal or quasi-experimental evidence from descriptive findings, implementation findings, and emerging hypotheses so decision-makers can see both what was learned and how strongly the evidence supports each conclusion.

This project is being shared with prospective funders and will be a funded project. The budget range is $300,000 to $500,000.

Data availability and quality will be assessed during the first phase. The evaluation partner should not assume that the two pilots currently use identical definitions, reporting processes, or data systems; common definitions and pilot-specific limitations will be documented.

Teams should be able to design and carry out a rigorous, practical multi-site evaluation; develop credible comparison strategies; combine administrative, survey, financial, and qualitative evidence; assess costs and cost-effectiveness; and translate findings into clear guidance for decision-makers.

Experience with child care or early childhood programs and government pilots is preferred. Familiarity with North Carolina's child care system and DCDEE data is helpful but not required.

The evaluator will define the final data specification, including variables, units of analysis, collection frequency, source, and responsible party. Expected inputs include provider enrollment and operations data; licensed and operational capacity; vacancies; infant and toddler capacity; provider creation and retention; staffing; financial sustainability; implementation records; qualitative interviews; and findings from the statewide family child care needs and preferences survey. The design should establish baseline measures before intervention wherever feasible, identify the data needed for a comparison condition for each pilot, and specify which elements require provider consent or additional privacy and data-sharing protections.

Proposals should demonstrate:

• Methodological rigor and realism: A credible design that fits the pilots' actual statutory, operational, geographic, and budget constraints.
• Cross-pilot coherence: A useful common learning framework without overstating causal comparability between two different interventions.
• Measurement and data planning: Clear common and pilot-specific measures, active-data-collection comparison approaches, and a practical data-governance strategy.
• Relevant experience: Multi-site and multi-intervention evaluation, quasi-experimental methods, mixed methods, cost-effectiveness analysis, early childhood or child care research, and government demonstrations.
• Feasibility and communication: A staffing plan, schedule, and phase-based budget that can deliver clear findings for policymakers, agencies, funders, and implementation partners.

The opportunity is intended for an independent evaluation team capable of completing both phases of work across both pilots. Proposals should identify the full project team, relevant roles, and examples of comparable evaluations that informed statewide policy or scale decisions.