For individuals who take on the responsibility of caring for another person due to illness, disability, or declining abilities, it can often be challenging, lonely, costly, and exhausting. As the United States continues to address the unprecedented impact of Covid-19 on caregiving, the need to recognize and support family caregivers as the cornerstone of society has become even more urgent.
Today, more than one in five Americans (21.3%) are caregivers, defined as having provided care to an adult at some point in the past 12 months or to a child with special needs. According to the AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, in 2020 there were nearly 48 million unpaid caregivers in the United States, a number that swelled further during the pandemic.
Despite the enormous and growing needs of unpaid caregivers, there is no comprehensive infrastructure in the United States to support them. Becoming a family caregiver is a complex journey that often requires obtaining and evaluating vast amounts of information for which there is no central clearinghouse, improvising and coordinating a care system for their loved one, identifying who will pay for the needed services, and adjusting to the changing needs of the care recipient. They do all of this while also working (61%), caring for their own children (47%), and dealing with the health, social, and financial consequences of managing and providing care (80%).
The goal of the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute’s dciX-Caregiving Innovations Project, in partnership with Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company, is to catalyze change in the underserved market for adult caregiving. We set out to evaluate the current state of products and services to support caregivers and care recipients, and to identify ways to make the journey less fraught and overwhelming. We hope this project will advance the efforts of the many organizations and individuals working to spur creation of an infrastructure for caregiving in the U.S., on which so much of our economy rests.