Pivotal Cares: Creating a Modern Caregiving System for Families

In August 2020, Jennifer Stybel joined Pivotal, the group of organizations founded by Melinda French Gates to accelerate the pace of social progress using high-impact investments, philanthropy, partnerships, and advocacy to get more power in the hands of more people—especially women—in the U.S. and around the world. In seeking to remove the barriers that hold women—and all people—back, Pivotal’s work included a focus on caregiving—particularly the disproportionate amount of caregiving responsibilities that fall—unpaid and unrecognized—to women. Pivotal sought to develop an impactful caregiving strategy and catalyze an ecosystem around the $648 billion “care economy”, where caregivers and families have the solutions they need, so care is a source of comfort and joy, rather than stress and hardship.

Utilizing their three-phase Think-Test-Do approach to drive sustainable impact, Pivotal employed a variety of levers across multiple sectors. Pivotal’s caregiving initiatives for their “test phase” included investing in startups and venture funds, supporting a growing startup ecosystem, and funding nonprofits and policy advocacy organizations.

In early 2024, Stybel and the team needed to define which of its multisector levers for impact it would deploy over the next five years in their “do phase”. It was important to demonstrate that investing in care yields benefits not only for women, but also for business and society at large. Stybel’s challenge was how to best implement their goals to make caregiving more affordable by unlocking “a once-in- a- generation” investment into the care economy.