Child care is one of San Diego’s most urgent — and most overlooked — economic issues. The average family with two young children spends around 40% of their income on care, yet the price of full-time care at a licensed center covers only a little over half of what high-quality care actually costs. Meanwhile, the educators doing the work earned about $33,000 a year as of 2021.

The Children First Collective set out to change that — to move child care from a private family expense to a shared public priority. But a problem this systemic is hard to make people feel. CFC needed more than a campaign; it needed a full communications operation that could shift the narrative, reach decision-makers, and keep the issue in front of San Diego all year long.

Uptown 11 serves as the Children First Collective’s full-service communications team — strategy, storytelling, owned media, and press, all under one roof.

Film & video. We produced a short film for CFC’s “We Choose Care” event featuring the voices of advocates and families, and documented moments like Congressman Peters’ visit to a San Diego YMCA child care center — turning policy into human stories.

Owned media. We rebuilt the Children First Collective website, relaunched and now manage their newsletter, and created the ongoing “Stories of Care” video series on Instagram — giving the Collective a steady, growing channel of its own.

Earned media. We pitch CFC’s story into San Diego’s newsrooms and op-ed pages, putting the Collective and its spokespeople in front of the region’s major outlets — KPBS, NBC 7, ABC 10News, CBS 8, Voice of San Diego, Times of San Diego, Axios San Diego, and inewsource among them — with CFC quoted directly in a dozen stories and opinion essays placed in the San Diego Union-Tribune and Times of San Diego.

Strategy, reporting & monitoring. We guide messaging, deliver regular analytics, and built a live media-monitoring dashboard that tracks every piece of San Diego child care coverage — more than 100 stories since 2022 — so the CFC team always knows exactly where the conversation stands.

Children First Collective now shows up consistently across San Diego — quoted on NBC 7, ABC 10News, CBS 8, and KPBS, featured in Voice of San Diego, Times of San Diego, Axios San Diego, and inewsource, and present on the region’s opinion pages. And the impact runs deeper than any single hit: years of disciplined storytelling and pitching have helped shift the entire local conversation. Across the 100+ pieces of San Diego child care coverage Uptown 11 tracks in a custom-built media dashboard, more than 80% now frame the issue the way the cause needs it framed — as an urgent economic and human problem worth solving.

The Collective’s own channels have grown just as fast. In 2025, website traffic climbed more than 6x, the newsletter holds a 50% open rate across 700+ engaged subscribers, Instagram and YouTube audiences keep compounding, and a single campaign video crossed 50,000 views — turning a coalition into a media operation with real reach of its own.

The result is a child care conversation that no longer lives only in policy circles, and a Collective with the communications infrastructure — and the data — to keep building public will for the long haul. Uptown 11 remains CFC’s full-service comms partner on an ongoing basis.