About This Report
This playbook is the result of reporting, research, and over 40 forty interviews with funders, nonprofit leaders, politicians, care workers, lawyers, investors, and policy experts. It explores why creating unity in addressing care issues is so urgent. It highlights what is working across sectors by elevating some of the success stories at the federal, state, and local levels that could be models for future campaign strategies or tactics. This report takes as a starting point the care policy agenda and vision so many organizations have spent years researching, articulating, and fighting for, and offers a practical tacticians’ playbook for how policymakers, activists, business leaders, care workers, philanthropists, media, cultural influencers, and care consumers can be a powerful part of a burgeoning “care movement.” This playbook includes some definitions and context for where we sit in 2023 and is organized into eight tactics combined with case studies. The goal of this work is to help people working on different care issues and in different contexts across the country chart a collaborative and effective path forward with the goals of supporting and elevating care.
This report focuses exclusively on the United States and our unique political, economic, and cultural contexts. While decades of scholarship and activism have contributed to where we stand in 2023, this report largely focuses on the impact and opportunities that arose since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. A once-in-a-century crisis that took a sledgehammer to an already weak status quo of care has been a generational turning point. We don’t yet know what historians will say about this moment, but it’s left an unprecedented footprint on how America cares. How our society responds is the future that has yet to be written, which makes understanding this moment all the more urgent and abundantly full of opportunities.
“We don’t yet know what historians will say about this moment, but it’s left an unprecedented footprint on how America cares.”
The Better Life Lab views this playbook as only the beginning. There are so many more wins and instructive lessons to learn from and share. We hope this initial compilation of pandemic-era tactics, strategies, and case studies helps spark more ideas, conversations, and actions. We hope to deepen our in-depth reporting, compelling storytelling, convenings, and collaboration and use our narrative change skills to continue strengthening the connective tissue within the care movement and grow its reach, urgency, and power.
What Is “Care”?
For this report, “care” is defined as broadly inclusive of all aspects of attending to the health, well-being, and safety of yourself and others in a paid or unpaid capacity. This includes caring for children from birth to age five and all forms of care that happen during out-of-school time for kids ages five to 18. This also includes elder care, disability care, and the ability to care for loved ones during short-, medium-, and long-term illnesses or injuries, from a toddler with the sniffles to supporting a spouse through years of cancer treatment. Medical care is crucial to everyone’s health and well-being, but it’s such a vast and complex subject in the American context that the scope of this report can’t fully do it justice. Therefore this report will only cover non-medical forms of care.
Creating structures that support this paid and unpaid labor broadly benefits everyone. The reality is that everyone receives care at some point in their lives, and most everyone gives it. The “care movement” works towards a world where people can care for themselves and their loved ones without social or financial penalty. It aims to create a society that treats and pays care workers as valued professionals by seeing care work as dignified and valuable. This is recognized as key to creating a desperately needed supply of quality, affordable, flexible, and abundant care for children, older adults, and sick and disabled people. But specifically, the care movement is looking to improve overall conditions for paid and unpaid care providers, those who purchase care, and those who receive it.
Another term that came up frequently while discussing the care movement was “north star.” It’s the idea of those with lived experience collaborating with advocates to find a big-picture goal that inspires and rallies people around what the care movement actually needs. This is very different from policy wonks suggesting incremental solutions. Thinking small and advocating for tweaks isn’t what gets people who are facing a crisis out campaigning, talking to their friends, and lobbying their representatives. “North stars” are bold ideas worth fighting for.