Pandemic shutdowns exposed the ubiquity and fragility of the “care economy,” a catch-all term for child care, home care, and elder care.
For nonprofit workers advocating for care jobs and policies, these were not new concerns. But the pandemic crisis spurred a group of philanthropies to take collective action, says Anna Shireen Wadia, executive director of the Care for All with Respect and Equity (CARE) Fund and a former Ford Foundation program officer. “The pandemic ripped the invisibility cloak off of things that care advocates have been talking about forever — that care is essential for families to thrive and also is fundamental for our economy,” she says.
In 2021, major grant makers including the Ford, W.K. Kellogg, and Robert Wood Johnson foundations launched the pooled fund, aiming to raise and distribute $50 million over five years. Three years later, the CARE Fund has attracted $40 million from a total of 16 donors, Wadia says, making it the largest philanthropic effort to highlight the need and value of tending to young, old, and sick people and to help ensure that caregivers, care workers, and care recipients can help inform policies at all levels of government.
Care advocates say this new infusion of philanthropic dollars has helped bolster bipartisan support for their movement, which has decades of grassroots organizing behind it. A majority of voters want care giving to become easier and more affordable for families. While some conservative lawmakers and interest groups oppose major federal investments, more states, both conservative and liberal, have passed paid family and medical leave policies. Many legislators are now talking about care as essential infrastructure and a kitchen-table economic issue.
“This is really years and years of organizing and work and message development and coalition building that has gotten us to this moment,” says Wadia.
Collective Funding
The CARE Fund is part of a recent trend, accelerated by the pandemic and racial justice protests, of pooled grant-making funds started by like-minded foundations.
“It really is a powerful story of philanthropy accompanying people who are seeking change, learning as we go, and evolving together in partnership,” says Ai-jen Poo, who founded the National Domestic Workers Alliance in 2007 and has served as a Ford Foundation trustee since 2017.
In January 2021, using funds from its social bond program, Ford gave $3.5 million and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation gave $1.5 million to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors to launch the CARE Fund. Schusterman Family Philanthropies made its first contribution in February. By March 2021, the CARE Fund began to make rapid-response grants.
Grant makers including the Heising-Simons Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Perigee Fund, Pivotal Ventures, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation joined over the course of 2021. Many of these funders have also increased their grant making to care issues independent of the pooled fund. (The Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations are financial supporters of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
The fund’s more than 60 grantees include groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the American Association of People with Disabilities, as well as coalitions that help coordinate strategy — campaigns like the Care Can’t Wait and Paid Leave for All People.
Multiyear grants are supporting grassroots leadership development and movement-building as well as polling, messaging, and research about how caregiving is talked about in media and culture, and care’s connection with issues like reproductive freedom and immigrant rights. The CARE Fund has also supported the National Women’s Law Center, Open Markets Institute, and Americans for Financial Reform to analyze the impact of private equity investors entering child care and home-care industries.
Before this coalition was created, most grant makers tended to fund child care or workers’ rights or aging as discrete concerns. But the CARE Fund’s grant-making strategy — supporting both nonprofits advocating for the interests of mothers or childcare providers and the alliances between them — mirrored the direction of the movement, says Poo.
Funders were listening to leaders in the field, she says, and recognized the importance of supporting “the connective tissue that allows for these organizations to be more than the sum of our parts.”
Tax Fight on the Horizon
CARE Fund grantees are gearing up for what promises to be a big debate about tax and budget policy in the coming year. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which expires at the end of 2025, offers opportunities to either finance new care policy investments or deal with increased cuts.
“It’s important for care groups to be prepared for different scenarios and be ready to weigh in,” says Wadia.
Organizations including the National Women’s Law Center, MomsRising, and Family Values @ Work have been helping to develop messages and host briefings on tax issues.
Family Values @ Work is focusing on approaches that help people understand how increased government investment could help lower the costs of care for families. “It’s not a household conversation just yet,” says Erica Clemmons Dean, the nonprofit’s deputy director. One program in development, called Tatted Not Tax, aims to equip organizers to sit down in tattoo parlors, barbershops, nail salons, and other spaces where people “engage in conversations that are affecting our communities,” Clemmons Dean says.
Some CARE Fund grantees, like Family Values at Work, have also launched 501(c)(4) arms that can do more lobbying and political advocacy in addition to nonpartisan work like get-out-the-vote efforts. Donors such as Melinda French Gates’s limited-liability company Pivotal Ventures, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies contribute to both.
“That has made a big difference in the success of this being something that is more central and centered by the White House,” Brook Kelly-Green, senior director of the Gender and Reproductive Equity team at Schusterman, says.
Such lobbying efforts could continue in the next administration. The Harris-Walz campaign has signaled a commitment to revive elements of President Biden’s family policy agenda that failed to pass as part of his 2021 infrastructure proposal and that included paid family leave, expanded tax breaks for families, and more affordable child- and elder care.
But both presidential campaigns have left room for ambiguity on other policy proposals.
While Republicans increasingly say they support additional spending on childcare, the Trump campaign has not offered a clear plan on how it would help families afford care. Paid leave is not mentioned in the Republican platform, but as president, Donald Trump enacted paid leave for federal workers.
Some elements of the “care economy” agenda, like the child tax credit, have garnered a measure of bipartisan support. Both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns have said they support expanding the credit beyond the current $2,000, which is set to expire next year.
State by State
The U.S. remains one of the few wealthy nations without a federal paid family and medical leave policy.
Much of the policy action has occurred at the state level. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation to create paid family and medical leave programs, most of which are funded through employee payroll taxes.
Even in states that have enacted paid leave policies, many employers do not offer these benefits, says Maya Rossin-Slater, a Stanford health economist and leading expert on such policies. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to improve access, she says.
“Even though there’s a lot of momentum and action at the state level, it still is the case that most of the U.S. workforce does not have access to any government-provided paid leave.” Among private sector workers, fewer than 5 percent of the bottom 10 percent of earners have access to any kind of paid leave through their employers.
The CARE Fund has made grants directly to groups in two states — Michigan and New Mexico — where organizations have the infrastructure and political conditions to pass new legislation. Many of the CARE Fund’s national grantees distribute philanthropic money to state or local organizations in their networks that support the grassroots work of parents, caregivers, and others organizing locally, Wadia says. Groups like Child Care for Every Family Network and its 501(c)(4) arm, both CARE Fund grantees, are working to bring lessons of changing state policies to lawmakers developing federal policy proposals.
Despite the renewed attention care issues are receiving, advocates say it’s not a slam dunk to enact big changes, no matter who wins the election.
“Both campaigns are saying some really good things,” Clemmons Dean says, “but we know it’s about the implementation that happens when the administration is in office.”
Paid leave has been a challenge to pass at the federal level. “Despite broad public support, historically the main opponents of paid leave legislation have been advocates for small businesses” who argue it would hurt their bottom line, says Rossin-Slater.
There’s also resistance from groups that view care giving as a private issue, rather than an economic concern, and believe expanded subsidies for paid leave, childcare, or home care is not the answer to the crisis of access and affordability.
Organizations like the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, for example, have urged lawmakers to reject federal paid family leave mandates and proposals that would increase government involvement in childcare.
Plans like those included in the Biden administration’s Build Back Better “would have made government the funder of day care and reoriented providers toward pleasing regulators and policymakers instead of families and parents,” IWF president Carrie Lukas said in congressional testimony.
Evolution of a Movement
In the 1970s, feminists fought hard for universal childcare but were dealt a blow when President Richard Nixon vetoed the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act, which had won bipartisan support in Congress, on the grounds that it would implement “a communal approach to child rearing.”
At that time, there was not a broad-based social movement focusing on care, says Anna Danziger Halperin, an historian of childcare policy debates and associate director of the Center for Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library. Back then, she says, advocacy for policies that support care was more splintered by issue, race, and class.
“What seems to me as unprecedented in recent years is how activists are drawing connections between care work across industries and sectors, for example bringing together domestic workers, early childhood care and education providers, health care workers, and more,” she wrote in an email.
The language used by organizers has also shifted away from workers’ rights to an emphasis on care and mutual dependence, says Premilla Nadasen, a Barnard University historian of domestic worker activism, whose latest book traces the rise of the care economy.
“It’s hugely beneficial for all of us that care is on the national agenda, that people are talking about the importance and the value of care,” she says.
Poo has been at the center of the modern care movement. In the late 1990s, she began to organize nannies, home health aides, housekeepers, and other domestic workers in New York parks and playgrounds, to advocate for expanded labor protections and changes in immigration laws.
Back then, women’s foundations like the Ms. Foundation and the New York Women’s Foundation provided some support. They understood the barriers to accessing care and the pervasive undervaluing and exploitation of a workforce that’s largely made up of women of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers, she says.
As time went on, Poo, drew support from many of the biggest foundations to support the National Domestic Workers Alliance. In 2022, that group reported more than $24.5 million in revenue.
As grant makers have expanded their support of the care movement, they’ve shifted their approach and mindset to not expect immediate wins, says Krista Scott, a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “Power building and influence is a slow game, and it’s not always predictable,” she says.
For Poo, it feels like the movement is gaining strength.
“If you were to tell me 25 years ago this is how we would get to a place of having this much support and momentum behind the agenda,” she says, “I never could have imagined that.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
