Innovations for Universal Early Care and Education

The Covid-19 pandemic had sparked a continued burst of action, both small and large, across the country, as communities sought to grapple with the child care crisis.

Better Life Lab writers Haley Swenson and Rebecca Gale argued in the Columbia Journalism Review that mainstream news organizations have for too long neglected to cover child care in a sustained, robust, and rigorous way. We made the case for news outlets across the country to dedicate resources to forging child care beats in their newsrooms. Yet we also saw that those same newsrooms were struggling to survive in a tightening economy, shedding jobs and dropping coverage areas. Many lacked the bandwidth to add child care coverage to the reporting beat.

We decided to take advantage of both trends: that there was more to report on child care innovations, and that there were now more seasoned reporters with experience covering policy available in need of work. We offered a round of reporting grants, similar to a previous project in which we had offered reporting grants to independent journalists to dig into understanding the impact of paid family and medical leave on workers with care responsibilities. We asked independent journalists, writers, and content creators from a variety of backgrounds and regions in the country to turn their reporting eyes on the child care crisis and places where communities were coming together to seek solutions to address it. The grants were also designed to help develop and support a cadre of talented journalists and content producers to expand the chorus of storytellers who can write with nuance and understanding about care infrastructure.

What follows on this page is a series of our efforts - stories told by reporters we have worked with, and stories by our own Better Life Lab team. The stories may range in specificity and medium, but they are aligned in the goal of making child care a larger part of our national conversation. 

For if we want to shift narratives about the way our country views care, we also must change the stories we tell about it too. 

This project is a collaboration between the Better Life Lab program, Early & Elementary Education program, and Early Learning Nation.