Key Findings of Let’s Talk, Marathon County Initiative

Tuesday, June 10th, 2025 -- 8:00 AM

The Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service (WIPPS) has released reports from a series of public deliberative dialogues on the topic of child care.

The dialogues were part of Let’s Talk, Marathon County, a WIPPS initiative that brings together residents of Marathon County from across the political spectrum to have constructive and civil conversations on important public issues.

During March 2025, 47 residents gathered in 7 groups to participate in moderator-led discussions around the topic of “Ensuring Access to Safe, Quality, and Affordable Child Care.” Additionally, two Spanish language dialogues were held with 22 participants.\

According to Dr. Sharon Belton, director of WIPPS Research Partners and the lead analyst for Let’s Talk, Marathon County, “Access to safe, quality, and affordable child care has been identified as a crisis at national, state, and local levels.  This issue directly affects families, schools, employers, communities, and government. Let’s Talk, Marathon County provides a framework for weighing alternatives and for identifying common ideas.”

The Let’s Talk, Marathon County dialogues have consistently demonstrated that community members with diverse viewpoints can come together to discuss key topics of public interest in a respectful and civilized manner.

Through public deliberation, people can consider tradeoffs and solutions to complex challenges facing communities. Let’s Talk, Marathon County was launched in 2023 with a mission to address political polarization by fostering constructive conversations on a variety of public issues.

Let’s Talk, Marathon County was selected as one of 32 grantees for the Healing Starts Here initiative, a nationwide effort to address and understand divisive forces in communities and promote healing.

This initiative is fully funded by New Pluralists. WIPPS was chosen from a pool of almost 800 applicants, and no taxpayer dollars were used for this project. To view the full reports, visit wipps.org. Key findings from the child care dialogues include: 

• The Let’s Talk, Marathon County dialogues helped the participants expand their views on how to address child care challenges and the vast majority reported finding areas of common ground. For example, 94% reported “quite a bit” or “a great deal” of common ground about how to provide safe, quality, and affordable child care.
• The Let’s Talk, Marathon County dialogues helped participants appreciate diverse viewpoints on how to address child care challenges and helped participants develop greater trust in fellow community members with differing views. A large majority (82%) of dialogue participants reported that participating in the dialogues made them value viewpoints that differed from theirs “somewhat more” or “much more” than before.
• Dialogue participants reported greater confidence in the community’s ability to engage in civil conversations. A large majority (84%) reported that participating in the dialogue made them “somewhat more” or “much more” confident that their community can engage in civil conversations about child care issues.
• When considering action items to help support parents in meeting their child care needs, there was most support for efforts to educate families about existing community child care resources. However, participants raised practical concerns about who would maintain information about available resources; how such an effort would be funded; how to ensure that rural areas were included; and whether the information would be accessible in multiple languages. There were additional concerns about whether it may be disingenuous to increase awareness of child care resources knowing that what is available may not necessarily be adequate to meet families’ needs.
• There was consistent opposition across the dialogues of communities promoting or encouraging parents to change jobs or leave the workforce as a solution to child care challenges, or for having families move to other communities with better child care resources. Individuals, communities, and the local economy can be negatively impacted when families leave the workforce or move to seek work elsewhere. Spanish language dialogue participants noted that immigration status makes it challenging to change jobs.
• There was mixed support for employer-based solutions. For example, participants acknowledged that offering employer-based child care contributions could aid in workforce recruitment, but there was concern about whether small businesses could afford this option. Participants acknowledged that employers seeking to offer on-site child care would need to address practical considerations such as liability issues, operating costs, and administrative requirements.
• When considering government-backed solutions, encouraging school-based child care models at public and private schools, and at local colleges and universities received the most support across the dialogues. But there were concerns about the willingness of communities to allocate government resources towards these kinds of options.
• There were mixed views across the dialogues about encouraging government investment in online child care matching services to support both family and employer needs. While there was some support for this action item, it was noted that matching services can only go so far if there are not enough available child care slots. Many agreed that a centralized database would be helpful but debated if private organizations should run it instead and whether this should be a use of limited government resources.

In addition to the series on child care, Let’s Talk dialogues have been conducted on the topics of immigration, youth mental health, homelessness, creating healthy communities, and U.S. Presidential elections.

More information on Let’s Talk, Marathon County can be found at wipps.org and for further information on the Healing Starts Here initiative can be found at newpluralists.org.

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.