This year’s proposals include partnerships that will examine programs, policies, or practices that seek to reduce racial and economic disparities in K-12 educational outcomes; improve college enrollment, attendance, and completion among youth of color and youth from low-income families; divert youth from the juvenile justice system; and advance economic mobility for youth from low-income families and youth who are disconnected from education and employment.

We are proud to announce four new research grants, including three to support studies on reducing inequality in youth outcomes and one to support a study on improving the use of research evidence. Approved at our fall Board meeting, these awards will help build theory and empirical evidence in our focus areas.

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.”

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.

The result of close collaboration with Casey Family Programs and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, as well as numerous national organizations, researchers, and individuals with lived experience in child welfare, the 21st century research agenda for child welfare captures the diversity of individuals involved in the child welfare system to highlight the most urgent needs.

Denisa Gándara and Victoria Kim share insights from their ongoing study, which sheds light on barriers that impede faculty of color at research universities from from engaging with policymakers and practitioners around research. Having interviewed 20 faculty members of color who are either on the tenure track or tenured, Gándara and Kim detail the structural hurdles to external engagement and outline respondents’ recommendations for support from their universities.