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Recent News

  • A request for proposals for 2007 venture grants is now available. Proposals may be submitted until 5 PM on July 13, 2007.
  • A summary of venture grants awarded in 2006 is now available in PDF format.
  • The Outstanding Program Award of the Community Development Society was awarded to Mildred Warner, Director of the Cornell Linking Economic Development and Child Care Project for the work linking research, policy and practice.  She received the award at the Society's annual conference June 28, 2006 in St Louis, MO. 
  • A special issue of Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society on Articulating the Economic Importance of Child Care for Community Development, has just been released.  Edited by Dr. Mildred Warner, this issue builds on papers developed at a Cornell workshop on the same topic held in May 2005.  Leading economists, sociologists and policy specialists from around the country joined to debate the conceptual and methodological challenges to measuring child care as part of the regional economy.
  • Related to this project, Dr. Warner was a plenary speaker at the National Child Care Research Consortium in Washington DC in April 2006.  The Child Care Bureau was the first major funder of Dr. Warner's work with a grant of three quarters of a million dollars awarded in 2002. Dr. Warner has become the national leader in research on the importance of child care for the regional economy. See a picture of her with Shannon Christian, Assoc. Commissioner of the Child Care Bureau, at right.
  • The Cornell University Linking Economic Development and Child Care Project has received a three year $1,240,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to further the work of the Linking Economic Development and Child Care Project which she directs.  The three year grant is a partnership with three other organizations - Louise Stoney of the Alliance for Early Education Finance which specializes in child care policy, Gerry Cobb of Smart Start National Technical Assistance Center which will coordinate the venture grants, conferences, workshops and trainings for child care policy makers across the nation, and the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington which will serve as fiscal agent.  The purpose of this project is threefold: 1) to promote pioneering public policy that applies economic development strategies to strengthen the early care and education sector;  2) to test those ideas at the local and state level by investing in Venture Grants; and 3) to bring these efforts to scale by building a network of innovative leaders from a variety of fields beyond early care and education, including finance, planning and community and economic development, who can make early care and education a core part of economic development policy. The first Venture Grant RFP was advertised in May 2006 and 138 proposals were received from 38 states. 
  • Cornell hosted Dr. Stephen Landefeld, Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, to speak at Cornell on his work using the American Time Use Survey to build satellite accounts to GDP to value unpaid household time.  They find that GDP increases by a third to a half when the value of household work is added in.  Dr. Warner and her team (James Pratt and David Kay from Applied Economics and Management) plan to use the ATUS to build regional economic models, constrained by labor time, that will bring household work and market work into a common framework. See a photo of Ladefeld with Dr. Warner and her team, or a poster advertising Dr. Ladefeld's talks.
  • Dr. Warner's CRP workshop class this spring helped NYS develop a statewide conference exploring the links between economic development and child care.  The Conference, held on the Cornell campus May 24 attracted 75 child care and economic developers from across the state. As part of their work they developed a series of issue briefs on how to apply planning, economic development and transportation policy to child care.  They also conducted a survey of 300 economic developers, Chambers of Commerce and Empire Zone coordinators across the state and found that 80% of respondents believed child care should be part of economic development policy. See a photo of the class team at the conference at right, or program and issue briefs (including survey results).