When policymakers talk about diversity in the supplier base, they usually picture construction firms or IT vendors. They rarely look at the sector that may be the most diverse contractor network the state of New Jersey has: child care. The businesses that watch the state’s youngest residents are overwhelmingly small, overwhelmingly women-owned, and far more minority-owned than almost any other industry the state does business with.
This is not a marginal cottage industry. New Jersey’s child care subsidy program alone funds more than 5,000 providers statewide — child care centers, family child care homes, and school-age programs. It is, in effect, a vast public-private network: thousands of independent small businesses the state pays to deliver an essential service, much the way it contracts for any other. These are the businesses behind the state’s child care assistance, the family child care homes on residential streets, and the centers attached to workplaces and houses of worship — the infrastructure that quietly underwrites everyone else’s commute.
And the demographics of that network are striking. Within one New Jersey state grant programme, nearly 60% of child care providers self-identified as women-owned and nearly 35% as minority-owned — a markedly higher share than the non-child-care industries the state assessed; the sector is, by the state’s own description, one in which a high percentage of businesses are owned and staffed by women, particularly women of color. In the words of New Jersey legislation, these providers are predominantly women of color and immigrants. If you wanted to find the most diverse supplier base in the state, you would not start with the obvious industries. You would start here.
The catch is that diversity, in this network, has not translated into prosperity. The same providers who form a critical component of the local economy are often among the lowest-paid workers in the state, with limited access to health insurance, retirement plans, and other benefits; underinvestment in the child care infrastructure threatens the sustainability of the industry. One recent bill proposed a state-funded “Health Care for Child Care Program,” appropriating $10 million to provide health coverage to child care workers. A supplier base can be both extraordinarily diverse and structurally precarious at the same time. This one is.
Which is why the state has had to put real capital behind keeping the network upright. Through the NJEDA Child Care Facilities Improvement Program, New Jersey had awarded $125 million in grants to 607 licensed child care centers as of December 2025, with individual facility grants running from $50,000 to $200,000; the program deliberately targets communities of historic disinvestment, with a set-aside for providers in Opportunity Zones and a requirement that grantees serve low-income children receiving child care subsidies. A second phase set aside $5 million specifically for registered family child care programs — the home-based providers, frequently run by women of color — in grants of $10,000 to $20,000. Layered on top were pandemic-era stabilization grants and hiring bonuses drawn from a Child Care Revitalization Fund. These rank among the more substantial targeted public investments the state has made in any single small-business sector. The diversity was already there; the money is there to keep it from collapsing.
There is an important procurement wrinkle in all of this. New Jersey issues a Minority and/or Women Business Enterprise certification, but the state government does not give M/WBE-certified vendors special consideration — only some local government contracts do. In other words, the diversity of the child care network is not the product of state contracting preferences engineered to create it. It is organic to the sector. The state’s role has been less about steering contracts toward diverse firms and more about investing to stop a sector that is already this diverse from falling apart.
That is the quiet truth in the data. The most diverse contractor network in New Jersey is not a showcase or a target met — it is the network of women, and disproportionately women of color and immigrants, who run the small businesses that let every other worker in the state show up to their own job. When people ask where diversity in the supplier base actually lives, the most honest answer is the one nobody expects: it is minding the children.