Our Process

Through years of research, reporting, and countless interviews, the Better Life Lab has found that creating a truly equitable universal child care system will require robust, sustained public investment. Child care is not solely a family responsibility. It is infrastructure that should be seen as a public good, worthy of public investment that benefits our families, economy, and children.

True to its own reputation for quality independent journalism, the Better Life Lab supports storytellers by posing a question or topic, offering help when needed, and enabling reporters to independently report and shape their own stories. This year, these multimedia stories—print, video, and graphic explainers—explore this central question: What innovations or solutions are underway that could scale or help build an equitable, high-quality, affordable universal child care system in the United States? Specifically, what solutions are pushing to expand access to all families who need it, and provide care providers and teachers with living wages, stable schedules, and dignified work conditions?

The child care reporting by 11 independent journalists and the Better Life Lab team across 14 outlets in 16 different U.S. states (and Washington, DC) serves as a shocking wake-up call for how our current system fails to support families and children—specifically mothers—and exacerbates racial, income, and gender inequality. But perhaps more importantly, these stories offer hope for a way forward and show the transformative power that communities can play in deciding to make child care a priority, and the tremendous gains available when we invest in the people and places that support our families and care for our youngest generation.

The craft of journalism and storytelling often benefits from a collaborative process, and we employed this approach across this series of reporting grants. We provided close editorial support and encouragement for reporters who brought various levels of expertise in policy reporting. The Better Life Lab’s narrative change strategy calls for creating and maintaining a firehose of credible insights on work, family, and care backed by rigorous research and data. By “flooding the zone” with compelling stories rooted in economic and political realities and historical context, we aim to provide rich analysis and smart solutions to push against status quo thinking about the role of care in our society. Offering care reporting grants to a cohort of independent journalists and writers allows us to broaden the spectrum, diversity, and reach of that flood.

The following are a few key insights from our child care innovation reporting grants process:

• Narrative change requires sustained, long-term efforts to highlight the stories of real people, uplift solutions, and paint a tangible vision of a different possible future.
• Reporting grants are a useful mechanism for advancing conversation about policy issues affecting real people and increasing the diversity of stories and storytellers with different backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences.
• Through using reporting grants as a storytelling mechanism, we are building journalism and narrative change capacity, and growing the chorus of reporters who can write effectively about care and care policy.
• Understanding that policy reporting takes more time and expertise means that more funding and support from media outlets and journalism nonprofits should be provided for the journalists who undertake such endeavors. Support can take various forms, including additional compensation, editorial feedback, and giving solutions-oriented care stories priority placement in publication.
• Medium matters. Consider the variety of platforms and channels to use to tell these stories to reach a wide variety of both broad and targeted audiences, in and outside of echo chambers. Millions of people, parents, kids, providers, and employers rely on our child care systems to make our economy work, and they receive their news in myriad ways. By diversifying our storytelling mechanisms, we are able to reach more people where they are in their preferred formats, across political, geographic, demographic, and other divides, particularly those that traditional print media sources could miss.

Throughout the reporting grant process, the Better Life Lab team supported grantees in editorial collaboration, providing expertise, resources, and contacts where needed, sharpening reporting questions, and helping to shape pitches. We also brought the cohort of reporting grantees together for virtual convenings to create peer networks and support. By investing in new voices from across the country, the reporting grants are equipping a new generation of storytellers who understand care issues deeply and will be able to write with nuance and complexity about care and care infrastructure.