Diversity and Inclusion

Child Trends is a great place to work because of our people. We are a welcoming organization filled with talented, energetic, diverse, and friendly people from a wide range of disciplines, life experiences, and professional backgrounds.

As we have grown, we have assembled a racially and ethnically diverse staff and board of directors. The mosaic of life experiences of our staff provides us with a wide array of perspectives to help guide our research on diverse populations of children, youth, and families.

We place great importance on continuing to recruit qualified team members to Child Trends that build on the diversity of our workforce and have an understanding of the communities we serve.

Racial Equity in Research

Child Trends’ mission is to improve the lives and prospects of children and youth by conducting high-quality research and sharing the resulting knowledge with practitioners and policymakers.  Much of our research focuses on underrepresented populations and populations that have been historically disadvantaged. In many cases, public policies, cultural norms, and institutional discrimination have contributed (and continue to contribute) to disparate outcomes for children and youth of color. These systemic and structural barriers shape the experiences and limit the life trajectories of many of the individuals, families, and communities we study.

For these reasons, Child Trends is committed to including a racial equity lens in our research and communications work. While this isn’t the only lens we apply, it is a critical contextual factor in all our work. We seek to engage stakeholders who are representative of the populations we are studying as participants in the research process. We also seek to ensure that our work is relevant and useful to the communities we serve. Since evaluation and research are inherently rooted in culture, we expect our staff to be knowledgeable of diverse cultures, and we provide all staff with resources and support to deepen that knowledge. We consider diversity and cultural understanding when assembling research teams and seek to ensure that our measures are valid for the populations we are studying. When possible, our researchers disaggregate data by race and ethnicity and seek to understand and explain the structural factors that may contribute to racial or ethnic disparities. When communicating our research we take special care to provide the context for the findings, such as cultural or community factors or public policies.