Our Process

These multimedia stories explore this central question: What policy solutions or innovations are underway that could scale or help build an equitable, high-quality, affordable, accessible, and universal child care system in the United States?

Our innovation reporting grants went to over a dozen writers and visual storytellers, both experienced and novice. In one case, we contracted with a team of writers in a newsroom. We also relied on our own reporters at the Better Life Lab to tell these stories and identify trends, bright spots, and new ideas permeating the child care space.

The child care reporting of the Better Life Lab team and independent journalists serves as a wake-up call. Our current system fails to support children and families—particularly mothers—and exacerbates racial, income, and gender inequality. Perhaps more importantly, these stories offer hope for a way forward and show that communities deciding to make child care a priority can have a transformative effect. We can make tremendous gains when we invest in the people and places that support our families and care for our youngest generation.

Creating and implementing a series of reporting grants also gave us insight into how journalism and storytelling can benefit from a collaborative process. And it allowed us to provide editorial support and encouragement to reporters with varying levels of expertise in policy reporting. The lab’s narrative change strategy calls for creating and maintaining a firehose of information to challenge status quo thinking and show different ways of thinking and acting. That information includes rigorous research and data; evidence-based experiments; compelling stories; economic, demographic, political, and historical context; and policy analysis and solutions. In offering reporting grants to a cohort of independent journalists and writers and posing questions for them to dig into, the Lab is able to broaden the spectrum, diversity, and reach of that firehose.