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The exclusion of caregivers and other stakeholders from conversations about child care policy design exacerbates inequities in the sector. By design, women, people of color, parents, people without wealth or high incomes, and child care providers are severely underrepresented in positions of power, including the government positions that influence child care policy investments. Bringing these diverse voices into the policymaking conversation increases the ability of these constituency groups to ensure that policy decisions result in equitable outcomes that value the needs of children and families and the work of child care providers. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, child care programs shut down or reduced their capacity, and parents pulled their children from programs due to health concerns and struggled to manage work without child care. As the backbone of a sector already suffering from a chronic lack of public investment, child care providers were asked to do even more, including paying for protective equipment and additional cleaning supplies, often with fewer resources as a result of a system that typically pays based on attendance rather than enrollment. For early educators who already struggled with chronically low pay and lack of benefits, the added strain caused by the pandemic created new challenges that drove many away from the sector. This report looks at five key lessons learned from how Michigan, North Carolina, and Mississippi engaged child care stakeholders in the distribution of their emergency child care funding granted as part of the COVID-relief packages passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021.