Executive Summary

In 2021, as the proposed Build Back Better legislation, which aimed to allocate significant federal dollars to public care infrastructure, faltered and ultimately failed, the Better Life Lab embarked on a year-long exploration of smaller solutions, successes, and innovations. The goal was to capture efforts already underway to address the broken care system to inspire, offer hope, and ultimately contribute to building a scalable universal child care system that is equitable, affordable, and accessible for parents and offers high-quality care for children and living wages, benefits, and good working conditions for care workers.

Using a solutions journalism lens, the Lab published the results of this in-depth reporting project in a 2022 report, Innovations for Universal Child Care. This included interviews with a diverse set of providers, parents, innovators, and advocates. The report identified five key areas of innovation and noted 25 innovations. The solutions both highlighted the promise of thinkers, creators, and builders already working to make progress toward a more robust child care sector. The report also emphasized the need for even further experimentation, attention, and investment—particularly sustained public investment—to design and build universal child care infrastructure.

Once we published the report, we realized we had only skimmed the surface. The 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.

At the same time, 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 followed was a series of 15 multimedia stories: told through audio, video, graphics, and the written word. We relied upon the solutions journalism model to showcase examples of effective child care systems and innovative small-scale solutions, while still recognizing the need for sustained public funding and support to create permanent, equitable, high-quality, comprehensive infrastructure. Through our reporting grants, we showcased that child care problems exist across the country, at every socioeconomic level—though disproportionately affect the most marginalized and least-resourced populations—and the solutions required must be responsive to the very diverse communities, regions, and families in the United States.

Key takeaways from our stories include:

1. There is no substitute for federal funding for high-quality, universal, equitable child care infrastructure, but other entities (workplaces, states, and localities) are recognizing the need for stable child care infrastructure and attempting to fill the gap in the meantime, showcasing the growing interest among the public, local policymakers, and community stakeholders to find workable solutions.
2. Diverse types of child care arrangements—including home-based care and flexible family, friend, and neighbor care—can help meet the demand of child care and better serve under-resourced and lower-income populations, especially in rural areas or for families of color.
3. Educators who receive adequate compensation, training, and support for their role as child care providers are able to do a better job, stay in their positions longer, and experience less burnout and turnover than those operating in the current system where many child care centers pay poverty wages. A stable workforce not stressed about paying bills improves the quality of care.
4. The many consequences of a broken system for a variety of populations need to be fully understood to help build public support for child care, including in the way child care is reported on and visualized in our country.

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 quarterly convenings to create peer networks and provide 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.