What can improve the hiring and retention of care workers? Research led by Robert Goerge at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) will examine the labor market for childcare workers using linked data from multiple states. The project will construct a longitudinal dataset by combining administrative records, including childcare workers’ employment and wage histories as well as their educational credentials. The team will use variation in locations with different policy shifts—like local minimum wage increases or the rollout of universal pre-K—to estimate the threshold wage needed to retain childcare staff and identify any unintended consequences, such as daycare teachers being drawn away to work at local schools instead. The research will yield new evidence about labor policies in this critical sector.  Along with academic publications, expected outputs include interactive data dashboards that give states real-time insight into their childcare labor markets.

Since 2020 the Sloan Foundation has been supporting the establishment of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) within universities as a strategy to institutionalize support for open source software in the research enterprise. In 2023, Sloan provided two years of funding to six institutions, including Stanford University, to establish OSPOs, to launch a set of pilot activities to determine the most promising strategies for supporting open source software development on their respective campuses, and to develop a clear vision for a long-term institutional support ecosystem for open source. This grant provides an additional two years of support to the Stanford OSPO, directed by Zach Chandler, a 17-year veteran of Stanford who has worked in the Libraries, University IT, and the Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Research and supported by faculty director Russ Poldrack, to build on early successes and bridge to independent sustainability beyond Sloan funding.