FFYF’S SARAH RITTLING NAMED TO TIME’S INAUGURAL VISIONARIES LIST

Washington, D.C. – TIME named First Five Years Fund Executive Director Sarah Rittling to the inaugural TIME Visionaries list recognizing leaders driving meaningful impact in the lives of children across education, health and wellness, technology, economic opportunity, and more.

Sarah Rittling Is Making the Bipartisan Case for Childcare

By Belinda Luscombe

There is no official anti-childbearing movement in America, but it’s often hard not to feel like somebody is out to get parents. The financial math is brutal: most people can’t afford to raise children without full-time employment, but childcare takes up a huge slice of parents’ income—all while childcare workers are underpaid. This is the kind of affordability chasm where the economies of scale provided by an umbrella governmental scheme would offer a real benefit, yet the patchwork of federal programs helping to provide care for the very youngest Americans remains threadbare. 

For Sarah Rittling, executive director of the First Five Years Fund (FFYF) since 2018, the sharp outlines of this issue are an asset. “Because childcare’s such a real, definable problem, literally anything that we do to make it marginally better is a step in the right direction,” she says. 

Not that the organization she heads is doing “literally anything”; its goal is expanding access to high-quality childcare for infants through kids up to age 5 by shaping early childhood policies. It also works to protect and extend existing federal funding, largely by building bipartisan support and championing initiatives in Congress. It’s slow work built on gathering data, forming coalitions, and finding common ground. “I think the single biggest impact that we’ve made is to truly make sure that this is a bipartisan issue,” says Rittling. 

Most recently, the FFYF partnered with lawmakers in the House to help pass the Supporting Early-Childhood Educators’ Deductions (SEED) Act, which was introduced by members of both parties and allows childcare workers to deduct the cost of some classroom supplies from their taxes. (The bill is now in the Senate.)The FFYF also advocated for certain measures in H.R.1, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, which offered some relief from childcare costs via tax incentives. 

Before joining the FFYF, Rittling spent her career laboring among elected officials, most of them Republicans, as well as in consulting, so she brings an insider’s expertise to her role. She understands, for example, the importance of introducing new initiatives but also of running defense—of sustaining and fortifying existing federal programs like Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Her history has also helped her build a coalition of more than 100 diverse organizations to equip them to advocate for robust childcare policies at all levels of government. 

The work couldn’t be more crucial. A new report from the National Women’s Law Center found that the number of kids on waiting lists for federally funded childcare assistance almost doubled between 2024 and 2025 alone. Part of that enormous hike is because of the expiry of the emergency measures the U.S. government put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic that allowed parents doing essential work to keep doing it. “We learned that childcare was central, we learned that we had a system in this country that was going to crumble to the ground if we didn’t have government step in and save it,” says Rittling of that era. “This is more than just a mom’s problem.” 

It requires resilient vision to maintain hope when successive administrations on either side of the aisle have treated childcare as an expendable part of the budget. But Rittling is not one for giving up. “There’s too much work to do right now: to continue to build support amongst lawmakers, and to continue to highlight the realities that we face as families and economies,” she says. “We have to keep showing everything we know that’s going to move and change hearts and minds in our political system and in our legislative bodies, to try to shake something loose.”

Explore the full 2026 TIME Visionaries list here.