Celebrating with play: City Councillors Ausma Malik and Alejandra Bravo, Atkinson Foundation staff, and guests join the AECEO, OCBCC and CUPE Ontario for games with the Worth MORE! parachute
On Wednesday, November 26th, the Child Care Workers are Worth More! campaign won Atkinson Foundation's 2025 Good Fight Prize, a $50,000 award recognizing "fearless campaigns for decent work". The Worth MORE! campaign, a partnership between the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario (AECEO), the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care (OCBCC), and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario, was launched in response to the $18/hour wage floor for RECEs outlined in the first Canada-Ontario Early Learning and Child Care (ELCC) agreement, signed in March 2022.
With a clear message - Early Childhood Educators and Child Care Workers are Worth MORE! - our campaign helped communities across the province come together to organize events, rallies, webinars, social media actions, petitions, and meetings with MPPs. Together, we successfully advocated to increase the wage floor to $23.86/hour, while continuing to advance our calls for a proper wage grid, benefits, pension plans, and better working conditions, not just for RECEs but for everyone who makes ELCC possible.
By leaning into what ECEs and child care workers know best: building relationships through collaboration, play, and joy, the Worth MORE! campaign intentionally treated ECEs’ talents that are often overlooked and undervalued as important skills in political advocacy. This did not go unnoticed by the Good Fight Prize jury, who shared the campaign stood out for its “perseverance, creativity and breadth of organizing.”
The Worth MORE! campaign was just the beginning. We know there's still a long way to go to achieve our vision for early learning and child care in Ontario. The prize money will go towards launching a new campaign in 2026. A huge THANK YOU to all of our members, community partners, supporters, and allies who took part in this campaign and made it so successful! We are honoured to fight the good fight alongside all of you every day.
Learn more:
- Ontario campaign that helped boost child-care worker wages wins $50,000 prize (Toronto Star article, available in PDF here)
- About the Worth MORE! campaign: timeline, resources, etc.
- Meet the other finalists for the 2025 Good Fight Prize: the Investors for a Fair Economy Campaign and the Youth Climate Corps Campaign