The 2024 Child Care Reporting Grants Are Now Open

The Better Life Lab at New America invites reporters and writers to apply for child care reporting grants.

As part of our commitment to narrative change and supporting journalistic endeavors, BLL offers reporting grants for stories exploring visions for child care's future.

We’re looking for solutions-oriented stories focusing on how and why care issues matter to families, our country, and a thriving economy. We’re open to all mediums, including print and online stories, photojournalism, graphic stories, podcasts, audio stories, multimedia projects, and videography. As always, we’re excited by new and creative storytelling methods that help audiences understand why care matters and how it could play a pivotal role in the upcoming election. Stories should paint a vision of what’s possible in the future, and both new and experienced reporters are welcome to apply. We also welcome people with traditionally underrepresented viewpoints and perspectives in media.

We're happy to share a sample pitch that further shows the type of innovative, solutions-oriented storytelling we're looking for:

More Health Centers Looking to Retain Staff Offer On-Site ChildCare

Many hospitals and health care systems are in crisis when it comes to staff recruitment and retention. This is particularly acute with regard to nurses, who are overwhelmingly women and are resigning from hospital work in huge numbers during the pandemic. Child care remains one of the top reasons employees cite for leaving their jobs - and it’s even more critical for people who work in frontline “deskless” positions who have no access to flexible remote work, such as nursing. A nationwide child care shortage, exacerbated by thousands of child care locations closing since the pandemic began, has made the need for a reliable child care option a prerequisite for being able to work.

For families of color and other disadvantaged communities, the child care crisis has been felt acutely with the closures - and both groups are disproportionately likely to live in what are considered “child care deserts” without child care options, or to work nontraditional hours, which many child care centers are not able to accommodate.

One way hospital and health care systems are solving for staff recruitment and retention is by offering on-site child care for employees.

I propose a piece that focuses on the how and why of providing child care to health care employees. In particular, this addition of child care stands to address the nursing shortage and help working mothers, who often are forced to step back or step out of the workforce when there is not a reliable, stable quality option available. Both St. Louis and Tampa, Fl have hospitals that provide child care during non-traditional hours, which, for employees who work in health care, is crucial.

In addition to staff recruitment and retention, this story would focus on how the providers feel this affects the quality of care they deliver. Based on conversations with experts in the child care field, there is strong evidence that parents are better able to perform in their positions when the stress and burden of inadequate or unreliable child care is lifted. Reliable child care also reduces turnover and absenteeism, which enables hospitals and health systems to be fully staffed and cuts re-training costs. Hospitals lose an average of about $46,000 each time a bedside nurse resigns, which is about $7 million in nursing turnover costs for the average hospital in 2021.