Our history
A child care revolution
In the 1970s there were less than 700 child care places for the 700,000 Victorian mothers in paid work. A small but determined group of women led a revolution, setting up and supporting Australia’s first community-based child care centres.
These parents and professionals founded It Takes A Village (then known as Community Child Care Association) in 1971. For our founding women, child care was not just a question of numbers. Founding members like Winsome McCaughey AO dreamed of a new form of child care: quality, community-based care that brought parents and communities together.
In those days, we were a lone voice standing up for the rights of mothers in paid work to access quality community-based care for their children. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child.
Times were a-changin’
In the ‘70s, Australian men were the breadwinners and the head of the household. Women needed a male guarantor to buy property, and female public servants had to retire when they married. But times were changing – globally, women and people of colour were fighting for their rights. More and more Victorian mothers were entering paid work.
The members of our organisation brought their own research and knowledge together to create the Community Child Care Manual – a down-to-the-detail guide for parents on how to set up and manage a neighbourhood house. In 1971, we organised a sit-in demonstration outside the offices of the Victorian Housing Commission to advocate for the lack of safe play spaces for children. By 1979, we had helped set up the first fifty neighbourhood centres in Victoria.
A champion for quality and community-owned services
For more than fifty years, It Takes A Village has been a strong voice for community-owned services and quality education and care for all children.
In 1982, together with other state organisations we founded the NACBCS (now known as ACCS) to advocate for community-owned care at a national level. Against fierce opposition, we continually campaigned for community-owned services when massive for-profit corporations threatened their survival.
We have been a voice behind progress ever since – with the sector winning universal access to kindergarten in 2008, the establishment of the National Quality Framework (NQF) in 2009, and the history-making universal access to kindergarten for three-year-olds in Victoria in 2019.
In 2016, we began leading the Victorian Inclusion Agency, which offers inclusion support to all Victorian education and care services (3700+ services!). In the twelve months prior to mid-2025, the VIA’s Inclusion Professionals made a total of 7,033 service visits across the state.
We continue to campaign for policy change, including continued funding for the NQF, universal access and equal pay for educators. After years of advocacy, we won fairer pay when the Australian Government agreed to fund a 15% pay rise for early childhood and OSHC educators in 2024. As one of the four sector representatives in the negotiations made possible by the newly passed multi-employer bargaining laws, we were instrumental in this deal.
In 2025, we changed our name from Community Child Care Association to It Takes A Village, to better reflect our purpose and the professionalism of what educators and teachers do.
While our roots are in Victoria, we now support education and care services across the country. This includes the government-funded national Workplace Relations Service, which we run in partnership with CELA, providing free support to education and care services to help them access the 15% pay rise.