Building the Field of Care Storytellers through Reporting Grants
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Feb. 24, 2025
During the COVID pandemic, news coverage of child care in the United States surged, spotlighting the issue of our broken care system like never before. To build on this momentum, the Better Life Lab offered a series of grants to reporters to tell the story of child care and its pivotal role in our economy, communities, businesses, and families. By supporting independent writers and content creators, the Better Life Lab played a crucial role in keeping the child care crisis, the narrative that care is vital infrastructure, and the need for solutions at the forefront of the national conversation.
The stories produced by recipients have been published in local and national outlets across mediums—including print, online, magazines, graphic stories, documentary shorts, and radio.
Our stories are solutions oriented.
Rather than focus our narrative change mission on more of the problem—which research shows can make people feel disempowered and hopeless—our reporting grants seek to find and shine a spotlight on state, local, and private efforts to find solutions. Research shows that learning about bright spots, however small, can create a sense of agency and hope. Our grants lean into incremental innovations and solutions that build the energy and will to fuel public demand. They uplift examples that help foster business community support and show policymakers the value of investing public dollars in building the equitable, universal child care infrastructure this country desperately needs.
Past grant recipients include some of the top reporters covering child care and new entrants to the beat in an effort to bolster and amplify new voices. Most of the grantees' work focuses on uncovering how local governments, organizations, movements, and individuals attempt to improve our broken, patchwork child care system to increase families' access to affordable, quality care and improve wages, benefits, and working conditions for the care workforce. This includes nontraditional care systems, family, community, and neighborhood efforts, improvements in day-to-day activities, and local and state government changes in funding, subsidies, and regulations.
As part of our mission, we are constantly seeking new ways to bring narrative change to a broader audience and show federal, state, and local stakeholders—including families, providers, policymakers, and businesses—the value of fighting for new investments in care.