Paid Family and Medical Leave Reporting Grants Available from the Better Life Lab

We are no longer accepting pitches for paid family and medical leave pieces. However, we will begin to accept new submissions if and when we receive additional funding.

The Better Life Lab is offering reporting grants for reported, data and character-driven stories as well as personal essays that explore what it means to live in a country with no national guarantee of paid family and medical leave through telling the stories of haves and have nots. Specifically, the Lab supporting reporting that compares the experiences of people who have similar family caregiving responsibilities or medical issues who either do or do not have access to a paid family leave. We are particularly interested in work that explores equity across race, class, and gender, how the current voluntary employer-based paid leave system that covers just 17 percent of the workforce fosters inequality, and whether a public system could change that.

The Lab will support reported essays and stories in multi-media formats including print and digital writing, data visualization, audio, and visual pieces. Stories could explore, among other things:

• How the coronavirus crisis is shaping the experience and demand for paid family caregiving leave;
• Who is and who is not covered under the new emergency legislation;
• Comparing the experience of those who live in the handful of states that have public paid leave policies those in states without a policy, or who have access to to employer-sponsored private paid policies, which are often focused on new parents only; and
• How the experience with coronavirus is shifting attitudes about national public policy.

The Lab will work with grantees to shape, edit, and place their stories. Pieces written or edited by Better Life Lab team members have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Slate, Vox, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, CNN and other publications. The Better Life Lab podcast, hosted by director, journalist, and author Brigid Schulte, hit the Top 50 on Apple podcasts.

Contact Us

Please send story pitches for the paid family and medical leave reporting grant to Haley Swenson at swenson@newamerica.org or Brigid Schulte at schulte@newamerica.org. Pitches will be considered and grants awarded on a rolling basis throughout 2020.