The Care for All with Respect and Equity (CARE) Fund launched in 2021 with the aim of amassing and giving away $50 million over five years to impact policy and transform systems to improve caregiving and the lives of caregivers — including those who work with young children, older adults and people living with disabilities. With backing from some of philanthropy’s heaviest hitters, this power-player “pop-up” fund has provided immediate grants for urgent needs exposed and exacerbated by COVID, and continues to capitalize on what it sees as an auspicious moment to support the building of universal, publicly supported “care infrastructure.”
What is care infrastructure? The term, promoted by prominent advocates like Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, describes the broad role that good caregiving jobs play in supporting our economy, families and individuals. Specifically, it includes policies and practices like paid family and medical leave, childcare and early education, services and support for older adults and people with disabilities, support for family caregivers, and equitable pay and benefits for care workers.
Judging from the CARE Fund’s growth, interest among major philanthropies is strong. With initial funding from the Ford Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the CARE Fund had already corralled five more partners when we first covered it last year: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, Perigee Fund, Pivotal Ventures and Open Society Foundations.
CARE Fund Executive Director Anna Wadia left her role as a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation to oversee the CARE Fund in the spring of 2022. I caught up with Wadia at the Grantmakers in Aging annual conference held in October in Scottsdale, Arizona. I put the question to Wadia: “What has the CARE Fund done lately?” Here’s what she said.
New funders, new learning
Since we last covered CARE, more funders have joined, bringing the collaborative’s total to 12. These new funders include the JPB Foundation, Fondation CHANEL, focused on women’s empowerment, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation, and an anonymous funder. As of this writing, these 12 funders have committed about $26 million in two- to five-year grants. The fund is recruiting new partners and revisiting current funders about continued commitments to reach its $50 million goal.
The diverse funders backing CARE have already provided valuable co-learning, Wadia said. Some partners fund grantees focusing on lifecycle issues, others on disability rights, early childhood, women’s rights and workers’ rights. Being part of the pooled fund allows each philanthropic partner to learn about the grantmaking activity and topic-area expertise of the others. This kind of cross-pollination is particularly fitting for a fund committing to bridging, Wadia said. “It’s about working across issues and supporting organizations across constituencies.”
As I’ve noted before, aging-related funders seem to have a penchant for partnership, often citing the need to combine and leverage the less than 2% of philanthropic dollars that go toward traditional aging-related organizations. They also point to the benefits of bringing together different strengths and focus areas, and of learning from each other.
Whenever I hear this, I can’t help thinking that taking a team approach is also probably a lot more fun. Funders working on aging, as a group, always seem excited about the momentum in their space, which is not the emotion you might expect from people who spend their days thinking about the minutiae of Medicare and the progress of dementia.
Barbara Chow, director of the education program at the Heising-Simons Foundation, has said that early childhood funding also benefits from collaboration, and that Heising-Simons joined the CARE Fund out of a conviction that creating big, transformative changes in the early care sector requires it. Speaking during a July 2021 virtual panel hosted by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, she said, “We’re making a bet that working in coalition with other non-early childhood funders and grantees will broaden the tent for early childhood and create the necessary momentum for reform, especially in this rare moment of policy opportunity.”
A caregiver is a caregiver is a caregiver
This brings me to another trend among foundations focused on care, as well as social service providers, social workers, and increasingly, policymakers — that is, viewing caregivers as one population, regardless of the types of clients they serve. This is a key feature of the “care infrastructure” notion — the idea that workers like nannies, eldercare providers and people helping those with disabilities are often in very similar, very narrow economic straits.
At one level, working at a noisy daycare with toddler energy bouncing off the walls is a different job than putting in long nights to care for a person who has advanced dementia. Still, Wadia and others have emphasized that collaborative funding for the caregiving sector as a whole makes sense, because historically, caregiving jobs across the spectrum have been done by women, often of color, and many of them immigrants. “The devaluing of care and caregiving, whether by paid caregivers or those providing unpaid care to loved ones, has its roots in sexism and the idea that women’s work should be done for free. It also has its roots in slavery, where African-American women provided care support and domestic support for no compensation,” Wadia said.
Today, too, many nannies, housekeepers and eldercare providers are women from communities of color. At the same time, there remains a huge gap between the care many families need and what they can afford, even as caregivers earn poverty wages.
A “sea change”
As we noted when it launched last year, the CARE Fund evolved on the heels of decades of thinking about these problems and about how to support caregiving.
The Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan has given a turbo boost to this movement by using and elevating the care infrastructure framework. Through its grantees, Wadia said, the fund has helped speed that process along. “The CARE Fund came together when all this was coalescing. I feel we’ve catalyzed the collaborative work among organizations that came together to advocate for policies that fell under the rubric of Build Back Better.”
In the past two years alone, Wadia said she has seen a “sea change” in how the media portrays care and how policymakers and the general public talk about it. Although the Biden administration has been unsuccessful in moving its full Build Back Better agenda through Congress, that significant change reflects the power that collaborative philanthropic vehicles like the CARE Fund can wield in terms of influencing the public discourse and shifting the bounds of the politically possible.
With that in mind, will funders really want to wrap up the CARE Fund in another three years? “We decided to have a five-year horizon to start because we don’t want to start a new organization that in any way is in competition with the grantees we’re supporting,” Wadia said. “We saw this as a historic moment to bring philanthropy together.” Going forward, she will work with grantees and funders to assess the fund’s continued value.
