For the past several years, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Casey Family Programs, and the William T. Grant Foundation have funded and worked in close partnership with more than 50 individuals representing a broad array of experts, stakeholders, and people with lived experience to develop a 21st Century Research Agenda for a Child and Family Well-Being System. Drawn from this work, a new brief describes the partnership process and outlines guidance for funders in supporting meaningful partnerships between researchers and lived experience stakeholders. The brief and checklist share recommendations from lived experience experts on how they experience research, and recommendations for researchers and funders about who to proceed with respect and rigor.

In this new post, Program Officer Melissa Wooten offers guidance for proposing research on reducing inequality, writing: “Understanding why an intervention produces statistically significant outcomes requires moving away from studies that treat participation as the main variable of interest and toward those that analyze the materials and activities within an intervention as malleable factors that influence youth outcomes.”

This extraordinary group of early career researchers are committed to stretching their expertise in new directions to tackle a broad array of issues that will certainly make an impact on the lives of many young people.

Despite the right intentions, many reforms that aim to tackle systemic inequities in school districts come up against limitations. Why are school districts sometimes seeing disappointing results, and what can district leaders and their research partners do about them? New research points to the promise of an institutional approach that surfaces and recasts premises that drive individual practices, policies, and organizational arrangements.

In a new post, grantee Rebecca Lowenhaupt describes how partnering with educators and district leaders during the pandemic yielded new insights about the day-to-day realities of decision-making in rapidly changing environments: “In adapting our work to the new challenges facing our district partners, we learned as much about engaging in productive research-practice partnerships through disruption as we did about the research questions we initially set out to explore.”