As Hispanic Heritage Month Ends, the Center Enters a New Grant

As another amazing Hispanic Heritage Month has come to a close, we want to thank you for being a part of the last 10 years of the Center’s journey. During that time, we’ve been proud to provide you with research and resources to help programs and policies better serve Hispanic children and families with low incomes. We also invite you to join us in celebrating the award of a $7.75 million five-year cooperative agreement, from the Office of Planning Research and Evaluation (OPRE) within the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to continue our collective journey through 2028.

Over the next five years, the Center’s focus will remain on early care and education, on poverty reduction and economic self-sufficiency, and on other critical issues in the lives of Latinx families. We’ll also explore new lines of research: One will focus on understanding the diverse strengths and needs of Hispanic families served by Head Start and another will help inform data-driven service delivery and program administration. We will continue to support and expand the pipeline of emerging scholars pursuing research on those issues and build additional tools and resources to improve our research communities’ capacity to study and synthesize data on Hispanic families in ways that inform policy and programs.

The Center will once again be led by Child Trends together with Duke University; the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and the University of Maryland, College Park. We will continue to build a strengths-based, applied research agenda and portfolio that connect with the needs of policymakers, practitioners, and Hispanic families with low incomes.

So, what can you look forward to in the near term? In the upcoming months, we’ll release new analyses and data on the economic well-being among Latino children, early care and education (ECE) utilization, mental health among the Latine ECE workforce, the impacts of COVID on the occupations and industries in which Latino parents work, and the educational attainment of Latino parents—along with a brief on the diversity of the Latino community.

With gratitud y entusiasmo,

Lina Guzman, Child Trends
María A. Ramos-Olazagasti, Child Trends
Natasha Cabrera, University of Maryland, College Park
Danielle Crosby, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Lisa Gennetian, Duke University
Julia Mendez, University of North Carolina at Greensboro