The New York City Early Childhood Research Network (the Research Network) was established in 2015 to bring researchers and policymakers together to investigate and improve early childhood program quality in New York City. The Research Network is committed to generating actionable research that can provide timely data to help City officials with the implementation of New York City's early care and education system. In our work, we have three objectives: identify and promote research opportunities, disseminate research to inform policy and practice, and build the community and capacity of researchers in New York City dedicated to rigorous applied research to inform policy and practice. With initial investments from the Foundation for Child Development, eight research projects examining the implementation of PreK for All are underway. The New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute, which facilitates the Research Network, has secured new funds for research focused on the NYC workforce that supports children from birth through age three.
In New York City, the infant and toddler workforce is vast. Our youngest children are routinely cared for in a wide variety of settings by people with a range of qualifications, education, and experience. In addition to parental care, children from birth through age three may be in informal care arrangements in which family members, friends, and neighbors provide care, or they may be in licensed family child care homes or community-based child care centers. Infants and toddlers may also receive early intervention, preschool special education, or home visiting services. The NYC Administration for Children's Services, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the Department of Education all play significant roles in funding and administering these services and supporting the infant-toddler workforce. The funding available in this opportunity aims to contribute to the work of the City officials in these agencies as they strive to provide our youngest children with access to excellent care.
With this RFP, we intend to make two awards for research projects that deepen our understanding of the infant and toddler workforce. The Research Network has several principles that will inform our selection process. First, we are committed to rigorous research that produces actionable policy recommendations to support our City agency partners' work. Second, we believe that various forms of inquiry are needed to understand and improve the implementation of policy and we welcome qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research proposals. Third, we are committed to collaboration and therefore grantees will be expected to share research protocols and deidentified quantitative data within the Research Network. Finally, we aim to build the City's research capacity to investigate and improve early childhood policy and therefore encourage proposals that include racially, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse research teams as well as early career scholars.
We are interested in supporting research projects that will address at least one of the following topics:
We expect to make awards decisions by September 15, 2018 and anticipate that data collection will begin in the fall of 2018. We intend to offer two awards that will range from $50,000 to $175,000. Awardees will need to enter into a sub-award agreement with the Research Foundation of CUNY.
We advise you to draft your application in Word and then cut/paste it into this application. The application fields are character-limited and include spaces. In general, 3,200 characters represent about one page, and 1,600 characters represent a half page. Brevity and clarity are appreciated. Therefore, it is not necessary to use the maximum allotted characters to answer each question.
All submissions are due by Wednesday, August 15th at 5pm EST