As Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) Lead Agencies, you need evidence to help inform the policy and program choices you make. One way you can build evidence to inform the choices you make is to partner with researchers.

For more information, see our full brief, “How to Build and Strengthen Partnerships between CCDF Lead Agencies and Early Care and Education Researchers: Supporting Evidence to Inform Policy.”

Why This Matters

This fact sheet aims to introduce CCDF Lead Agency staff to researcher-agency partnerships. Researcher-agency partnerships are long-term, collaborative relationships between researchers and government agencies, such as CCDF Lead Agencies. This snapshot describes what agencies said about how starting and continuing researcher-agency partnerships improves their work. It details problems agencies faced when starting and continuing partnerships. Finally, it provides approaches and tools agencies can use to prevent, prepare for, and address these issues.

Key Takeaways

Researchers and agency staff expressed that there are many benefits for agencies involved in researcher-agency partnerships, such as being able to build more complex evidence on policies and practices. Approaches and tools, such as drafting an agency engagement plan and a learning agenda, can set a new partnership up for success. Continuing partnerships may benefit from regular communication, building trust, and updating the shared-goals agreement and learning agenda.

How We Did It

We gathered information for this research snapshot from three sources: (1) discussions from community of practice meetings with OPRE-funded Child Care Policy Research Partnership (CCPRP) 2019 and Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Implementation Research and Evaluation Grant team members; (2) interview responses by researchers, CCDF Lead Agency staff, and community-based organizations involved in researcher-agency partnerships; and (3) existing literature.