Transcript:

[00:00:00] Emily Race: Welcome to the Founding Mothers podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. Today we are speaking with Sarah Vitti. Sarah is the Senior Manager of Culture Change at Caring Across Generations, a national campaign that is transforming our country's care infrastructure and the way that our society relates to and values caregiving. In her role, she develops and implements creative multi-platform cross-disciplinary strategies to create cultural shifts that lead towards a world where care is visible, valued, and collective.

[00:00:48] Sarah Vitti: These ideas of who's expected to do care. Women, and in our households it's women, and in terms of care work, it's, you know, primarily black, brown, and immigrant women who are expected to do this work. And so because of those legacies of patriarchy and white supremacy, racism, and sexism, historically we have not valued care and caregiving as work and as labor, which it is, but it's also love. 

It's also like just simply what humans do and need to do in order to survive to thrive. 

[00:01:25] Emily Race: Sarah is also a creative in her own right. She's a producer, a poet, and digital collage artist. She's currently birthing an artist residency in the woods of the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York at the Root Community, a place where Sarah spends a lot of her time with friends who are artists and community builders, posting music and arts events, farming and building treehouses.

The Root Residency will support artists in reimagining new ways of creating, while connecting with land without prescription or external expectations of creative product, and will empower artists to take risks, helping expand and strengthen their sense of self as multidimensional creatives, storytellers, world builders, and dreamers.

Welcome, Sarah. It's so good to see you and to have you with us today. 

[00:02:09] Sarah Vitti: So good to see you Emily. Thanks for having me. 

[00:02:12] Emily Race: Could you share a bit about who you are and the work you do in the world and with caring across generations? 

[00:02:19] Sarah Vitti: Yeah. As an individual in the world, I am myself a creative; I write poetry, I do some digital collage art.

I produce art events. And I'm in the middle of birthing an artist residency program in upstate New York in the Mohawk Valley, butas my full-time job, I am the senior manager of Culture Change at Caring Across Generations. We're a nonprofit, but we call ourselves a movement because that is really what we are, of caregivers, people with disabilities, aging Americans and families, that are working to transform systems and culture supporting caregiving in America. I can go more into what I do at Caring Across and the work that the organization does as a whole.

[00:03:13] Emily Race: Yeah. I would love for you to share your specific sphere of influence in the organization.

[00:03:18] Sarah Vitti: Sure. I'm actually gonna start with some broader context about the organization that will then lead to the work that I do on the culture change team, becauseit I think it requires a bit of context for most people to get the full picture.

So as a campaign, we do policy work at the state and federal level around care infrastructure, and that includes childcare, paid leave, long term care in the home. We also do a lot of work around narrative and culture change around caregiving to move society in the same direction that we wanna move policy.

And so we do that through powerful storytelling and narrative change work, which cuts across a lot of sectors and types of creative storytelling and pop cultural content and many different artistic mediums that are all pieces of cultural currency and tools that we use to tell the stories that people consume. 

To take a step back, because I think it'll be really potent for this conversation, to understand what we mean when we say “caregiving”. Especially around the storytelling work that we do, we talk a lot about care broadly. But then in terms of policy, we're fighting for really specific policy that supports families and people who need care and who are providing care for loved ones.

We define caregiving pretty broadly, and that's because we recognize our interdependence and that it takes an ecosystem of care not just to survive, but really to thrive in the world. So caregiving can refer to physical, financial, or emotional support. And typically when we talk to caregivers, either there's one or two people who are mainly providing all of those things, or there's a care team and everyone has a role. That care squad idea is what we really envision for the world,but it requires changing a lot of policy so that people can have all the kinds of care that they need access to, when and where they need access to it.

[00:05:21] Emily Race: Can we actually pause there to break it down even further in imagining the types of care that are required? Obviously you would have caregiving for children, but then I'm also imagining someone who, if they're sick or their health issues are compromised or elderly? Would you break it down that way? 

[00:05:38] Sarah Vitti: All of it. Yeah. When we talk about care, we're talking about care across the lifespan. It includes childcare; it also includes care for adults, whether they're adults with disabilities or children with disabilities as well.

Anybody with disabilities, anyone who's aging and needs care, people who are sick and need care, whether it's a short term sickness or a long term illness or, lifelong chronic illness. Mental healthcare, care for people who need support in healing, addiction and substance abuse. End of life care.

Really care across the lifespan. It's the most universal experience, being cared for and caring for another person. We all need care at some point in our lives and we all need to care for someone at some point in our lives. And then what Caring Across really holds the line on– because we're part of a broader coalition of organizations that are doing amazing work on fighting for care policy that creates this care ecosystem that needs to be robustified and made equitable.

So there's a lot of childcare advocates within that coalition that we lead. It's called Care Can't Wait. Caring Across Generations sits at the forefront and leads this coalition of childcare advocates, paid leave advocates, disability justice advocates. Working on issues with aging populations. And then we really are the ones that hold the line on what is called “home and community based services”, which is referring to access to long-term care in the home. We live in a country that unfortunately prioritizes institutionalization, especially when it comes to care needs. 

[00:07:24] Emily Race: Meaning someone would leave their home and go to an institution? 

[00:07:27] Sarah Vitti: Go to a nursing home, or a home for disabled people. And actually, 90% of people in this country who need care and rely on care, want to be taken care of in their homes and in their own communities. And we believe that everyone should have that choice.

And so our big fight as Caring Across Generations is to make access to care in the home; so home care workers more accessible, equitable, across class, race, ethnicity and to make sure those jobs are good jobs for domestic workers and home care workers. 

[00:08:02] Emily Race: This might be a stupid question, but I'm gonna ask anyway. You would think that we would have a society that's already understanding the value of care if, like you said, it's a human experience that everyone has gone through, either as a caregiver or the person receiving care.

So could you just explain, why is this important? Why do we have to have an organization like Caring Across Generations even exist? 

[00:08:24] Sarah Vitti: Yeah, I can actually talk a little bit about how Caring Across came into fruition, which was born out of the work that Ai-jen Poo, who is one of our founders, Ai-jen Poo and Sarita Gupta founded Caring Across Generations in 2011.

And that was after many years of Ai-jen and many others in this movement, doing a lot of work empowering domestic workers and organizing domestic workers to advocate for better policies so that they are paid well and are protected under policies that don't protect domestic workers because they're hired by private families.

To answer the question of, “why we don't have good care infrastructure” is because care, historically in this country, has been invisibilized and devalued primarily because of racist and sexist ideologies and narratives that play into the core of our broken care infrastructure. 

[00:09:26] Emily Race: It's like, what we value would not be care in the current paradigm that has sexism and racism built into it? 

[00:09:34] Sarah Vitti: Yeah. To be really specific, care work has historically been done by women of color and black women. And there's a legacy of chattel slavery there where black women, enslaved women were the caretakers of children, newborns and everybody who really needed care, and that legacy lives on in the way that we expect black women, especially immigrant, black and brown women and immigrant women, to do this work for very little pay when they have their own families to take care of and their own care needs and again, aren't protected under labor policies because this is not seen as a valued workforce when in fact, something that Ai-jen, my boss and the founder of our organization says all the time is that care work is the work that makes all other work possible.

So even though in terms of the culture and narrative change work that we're doing, we don't often talk about the fact that this actually is an economic issue as well in terms of how well our economy is doing largely depends on the care workforce. But that's definitely a huge aspect of this.

And so yeah, these ideas of who's expected to do care. In our households, it's women. And in terms of care work, it's primarily black, brown and immigrant women who are expected to do this work. And because of those legacies of patriarchy and white supremacy, racism, and sexism historically we have not valued care and caregiving as work and as labor, which it is, but it's also love, right?

It's also simply what humans do and need to do in order to survive, to thrive. The term “it takes a village” didn't come from nowhere. There was a point in time where we lived in villages and a child was born and everybody stepped up to raise that child and et cetera, et cetera. That's not the way our society is setup anymore because of capitalism. So in the narrative and culture change work that we're doing– to not just support the policy work, but also shift society as a whole– the way that we relate to and value caregiving and care work, it means that what we're actually doing is challenging dominant narratives of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism,ableism and ageism.

[00:12:03] Emily Race: Which lends itself to the work you're specifically doing, around the culture change and shifting narratives. t sounds that one paradigm is so embedded to us, even unconsciously, it's just that legacy of patriarchy and white supremacy, now we have some work to do to shift the way we think about care on a local, individual communal, wider global scale, I'm imagining. Share with us about what that looks like and the work you're doing. 

[00:12:33] Sarah Vitti: Yeah. I think it's worth naming that a lot of these core dominant narratives that we are challenging, that I just named, have really risen to the surface over the last two years with the pandemic and national uprisings in 2020.

And actually, we've seen a huge cultural shift simply because the pandemic happened. Covid lifted the veil, in many ways, around truly how our care infrastructure is even broken. It's like non-existent. It's completely inadequate and quite oppressive.and inequitable based on class. Covid 19 really illustrated the ways that the current system and structure is just failing us, as we are all trying to care for and support our families and loved ones. t's also important to name the caregiving challenges that people have exponentially faced over the last couple of years because of the pandemic. While many more people are facing them now, they've already existed, like I said, for predominantly black, brown immigrant and poor communities because those communities have been neglected by our government in many ways for a very long time. So the system that does exist is simply inaccessible if you don't have a wealth of money.

While caregiving and care work are still largely invisible in everyday life and the stories we consume, we have been seeing attitudes and cultural norms around care shift significantly over the past two years.

In terms of the narrative change and culture change work that we're doing, we're also really challenging the myth of the individual, right? This sort of seminal American narrative of individualism, which very much lends itself to capitalism and helps uphold capitalist structures and systems.

People are now understanding that we are interconnected. We need ecosystems of support and care around us.Olong term goal in the narrative and culture change work is moving a critical mass of people from thinking of care as an individual and private burden, that's just our own individual responsibility –

it's done behind closed doors; there's a lot of shame around it; if you didn't prepare for a care plan, it's your fault– move people away from thinking about it as that, an individual private burden, to thinking of it as a collective social responsibility that requires collective solutions. That's our North Star. And also moving from caregiving and caregivers being invisible and undervalued to being visible and valued in our culture. What that means in practice: anywhere that there are stories to tell and ways to tell them, we intervene in those spaces and we shape stories around care and caregiving.

Sometimes that's really specific. And sometimes it's care more broadly, but for instance, just to talk about some of the work we're doing right now,we actually just brought someone onto our team this year to fulfill a dream that we've had for a while to do more work in the entertainment industry. People watch TV and they watch films at home. We want to reach people at a large scale and get people to identify with the challenges that caregivers everywhere are facing, and to recognize that they're not alone in their struggle, and to also shape narratives that move us towards the vision of the world that we wanna be in.

We've begun consulting on television storylines and partnering with some shows here and there when there are opportunities to lift up a storyline around caregiving that is done really well. A good example of this is the show, “This Is Us”, which is hugely popular, especially among one of our key target audiences, which have historically been harder for us to reach.

We call them “tough cookies”. The “tough cookies audience”. They're generally between 40 and 65 years old; very diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, care a lot about future generations and also are not “people power” people. They love authority. They watch a lot of news, and a lot of television network shows like “This Is Us” and the other things on ABC and NBC.

On “This Is Us”, the last season, Mandy Moore's character had Alzheimer's, and there was this one scene early on in the season where she sat her grown kids down around the table and laid out her care plan. We've never seen that happen in a television show, ever. Typically, people who are aging and ill are not given much agency in storylines.

That really hard conversation that people need to have with their families around what's gonna happen and how they want to live the rest of their life and how they wanna receive their care and where, doesn't happen. Bringing that into millions of people's homes when we're at a time where 10,000 people every day are turning 65, people are living longer than ever, and more and more people have Alzheimer's because there are more and more people who are aging and we don't have the infrastructure to support it.

People are dealing with this increasing burden with no support on their own. For a show like “This Is Us” to represent that the way they did, it was so powerful. We reached out to their cast and we did a whole sit down with them about what it meant to have that on television. So that's one example of how we leveraged already existing components of pop culture that are doing what we wanna see more of or getting close to it, so that we can leverage that moment and that piece of content and reach those fan bases to let them know “you're not alone and this is an issue, and it's an issue that you can have power over.” 

[00:18:37] Emily Race: There was another episode where we talked about death and dying and grief with a grief coach and death midwife, and that was her advice, actually, if you're having a hard time having this conversation with your family, point to a show you watched or something that can help open that conversation. How beautiful that you're touching on that here, that this opens up the conversations, hopefully in thousands of homes, about what care looks like.

[00:19:01] Sarah Vitti: Because the shows we watch on television often represent the times we're in, there are more and more care storylines popping up organically. Even sometimes really minimally, not as the core storyline, but “This Is Us”, that was basically what the whole last season was about.

Then there are shows, like I was watching Abbott Elementary and at one point we very passively learned that the principal actually has been struggling a lot because she's a primary caregiver for her mother who needs a lot of help and they don't have a ton of access to home care. Even just that five minutes of conversation in that show matters so much. And so, we brought this person onto our team who comes from the entertainment industry to really start strategizing around how we talk to shows who already kind of have themes of care and get in their writers' rooms moving forward for future seasons to start shaping those narratives in ways that, through our work and the research we've done and years and years of talking to caregivers, making sure that when care is represented on screen, that it's done in a way that gives everybody agency, that is authentic to real lived experiences, and also helps us build towards the world that we wanna see. 

[00:20:13] Emily Race: Could we actually move to that, since I'd love to spend a good chunk of time on what the vision you all have– and even you specifically as Sarah has– for the world, around what care and caregiving could look like.

[00:20:25] Sarah Vitti: I'll start with Caring Across, as a movement and why we exist, it's pretty simple. We want everybody to be able to care for their loved ones so that everyone is able to live, work, and age with dignity. Everybody deserves that.People of all abilities, people of all class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation. 

Actually that just reminded me, I didn't name earlier on that part of the policy work we're doing is also around expanding the definition of
“family” in policy, and through our narrative and culture change work as well.

Because a lot of people who belong to the LGBTQIA communities, especially trans, non-binary people, often don't have blood relatives to rely on when they need care as they age– but also as they are transitioning or at any stage of their life– but especially the elderly queer community, don't have a lot of the policies that are in place in terms of care infrastructure that do support people in caring for their loved ones. You have to be blood-related to somebody. And so that doesn't apply to a lot of people in queer communities who are estranged from their families because they don't accept them.So that's really important. 

So, a world where we all across the lifespan at every single point of our lives can receive the care that we need from the people who are able to provide it for us, how we want it, where we want it, which is a huge piece of it. And when we need it.

[00:21:57] Emily Race: Yes, this sounds like the basics. That doesn't feel like too big of a fantasy. If anything, it feels like a reality that I wish we were living now. So where are some of those tension points? You just mentioned one with the queer community, for example, and in aging and having estranged family.

Where are there other tension points where it would help to build up the vision a bit more? 

[00:22:19] Sarah Vitti: Yeah, the issue of care is at the root of every other issue. It intersects with racial justice, because of how black and brown women and immigrant women are expected to do this work for very little pay without labor protection support, and also because of economic reasons and black and brown communities predominantly being disenfranchised economically.It's a racial justice issue. 

It's a disability justice issue for obvious reasons. We live in a very ableist world that is only now, again, because of Covid, starting to learn what it looks like for everything to be accessible. And so that's a huge piece of this work as well.

Economic justice. Again, unless you're super wealthy, millions of people in this country, middle class, comfortably living people,as soon as a crisis happens or somebody gets ill, you have to spend down all of your money to qualify for Medicaid, and then you're on years of waiting lists, anyways.So you basically have to bankrupt yourself to care for somebody. So it's an economic justice issue. 

It's an issue around equity for women, especially black brown, AAPI immigrant women. Transforming norms around masculinity and gender roles is a huge piece. We have done a few projects and collaborations specifically speaking to men and trying to get men in on this conversation, centering men in this conversation, which is usually frowned upon in social justice work, right,centering cis men. But actually, it's so important when it comes to caregiving because A) it's labor and men need to share that labor; and even further than that, there is no actual binary, right? So what it really means is that, it's not “Oh, men and women should share the labor.”It's actually, “we need to completely transform norms around masculinity and femininity and what those things mean and how that manifests at home and in our communities when we're caring for one another.” 

And actually, there are like 44 million family caregivers who identify as men that are unpaid family caregivers in this country.And they are less likely to ask for help and support. And there already isn't, right? People, women, everyone is already struggling with this. And because of expectations around masculine roles in the household, men are even less likely to ask for support in caregiving.

[00:24:42] Emily Race: The word that's coming back to mind for me is infrastructure piece; how that's so missing on a drastic level in our country. In this vision of the world, how might that infrastructure look orwork? 

[00:24:57] Sarah Vitti: One is just making quality care more affordable at every stage of life– whether it's childcare, whether it's long term disability care, whether it's care for the aging and elderly, end of life care– making quality care, affordable and then also making those jobs, good jobs, right?

Transforming state and federal policies around, Medicaid policies, that support access to home care. Expanding that for all types of home care and for longer term home care. And then making sure that those jobs are good jobs and the people doing them have protection.

[00:25:32] Emily Race: For that, I feel a tension in myself,and maybe I'm missing some information, but for it to be affordable, but also still to value the people who are doing that work, how does that tension with cost work? 

[00:25:45] Sarah Vitti: Yeah, it's a really good question that actually I'm not equipped to answer simply because I don't work on our policy team as much as I need todo my job well.But there are some really brilliant people– Nicole Jorwic leads all of our advocacy work, and she would probably have a brilliant answer for that. I think at the core, it's federal subsidies and state subsidies, right,and moving away from privatization of home care.

The agencies that often people hire home care workers from are really poorly run, completely underfunded, super abusive environments, like making less than minimum wage. That's not really a reflection on the quality of care. We need government solutions.

We need individual responsibility, also, we need communities and people to step up. That's why we're doing the work of shifting culture, because we need that to be parallel with the policy shifts in order to sustain long term. If you change policy without shifting culture, the policy's just gonna get stripped away over years and it's not gonna stay.

It has to do broadly with recognizing the need for government solutions and collective solutions,and really it's wrapped up in socialism a little bit, which we really call “collectivism and interdependence”, and that's really what it is. 

[00:27:06] Emily Race: Okay, cool. Sorry for that tangent, but it sounds like we're talking about making care more accessible to folks regardless of your financial status and having that show up in the ways that you desire so that you have dignity at all stages of life.

What else would we like to see more of? 

[00:27:26] Sarah Vitti: Generally, living in a society that understands and values interdependence. We've already been seeing this happen across the country over the last five to 10 years in different states where either there's localized funding for it, or communities are creating their own solutions.There are daycares now popping up across the country for aging and elderly people that also double as childcare centers. That has been proven to be extremely valuable and beneficial to the psyche of the children and the aging and elderly people.

When we say “home and community based services”, it's not just about bringing care to people's homes, it's about bringing care and creating infrastructure within communities where people can go and receive care they need during the day when you can't get somebody to come to the home. Or, if somebody wants to stay in their home to live in their home and community, but need some more support during the day, creating things like daycare centers, for people of all abilities, ages, who need care. Mutual aid is an example of collective care and infrastructure across communities that many populations within the US have relied on forever. And we're just — “we” being, middle to upper class, white people— are just learning what mutual aid really is and what community and collectivism really means.

[00:28:56] Emily Race: Do you wanna define mutual aid for folks who are like, “I've heard of it but don't know what it is?” 

[00:29:00] Sarah Vitti: Yeah, it's interesting actually. I don't know if I'll do a great job at defining it, but mutual aid in practice is when somebody needs financial, emotional or any type of resourceful support that the community around themprovides that. If you're on Instagram and following radical leftists the way that I am, you see a lot of mutual aid opportunities pop up where you know, “Oh, our friend ‘so and so’ needs top surgery and doesn't have the funds or the support. We're raising this much money and also, wanna pay their rent while they're out of work.”And people will just show up to do that. In smaller, tight-knit communities, outside of the world of social media, there's other ways we can lend emotional and other types of support, in addition to financial and resource support. It's collective care is what it is.

I think the term mutual comes from the idea and the reality that we all will need help at some point. And you and I both know very well that giving and receiving are the same one in the same. So, it's mutual in the sense that “I'm gonna support you right now because I can, I have the resources, I have something to give, and when I need care and when I need help and support, others will do the same for me.”

It's a mutual understanding. 

[00:30:25] Emily Race: There's probably many references in nature of how that exists. One thing that is pretty inspiring as you're talking about a shift into a community lens: these daycare centers; I'm starting to imagine now, what would our communities look like if we're centering care really and valuing it differently? How would we live alongside one another? Do you think that would shift at all? 

[00:30:55] Sarah Vitti: Absolutely. I think it would change so much about the way that we live and the way that we feel supported in asking for support. When that kind of infrastructure surrounds you, it becomes the norm. It becomes the thing that's just expected, right? And that's how culture change happens. 

An example of this is I'm at the Root Community right now, which is where I spend a lot of time in upstate New York. We call ourselves the Root Community because what we're in town called Root, but we're really, truly a community in the sense that everything here is fully accessible to anybody who wants to be here. We just had our big annual music festival a couple weekends ago. We had drug test kits on site.

We had a little area that people set up for a communal care tent that a lot of people utilized throughout the weekend when they needed to. We feed everybody well. We have people staying here now after the event who wanted to stay on the land and spend some more time here.

It's just amazing. There are like 15 people here right now on this property and everybody is constantly asking someone what they need, making sure we're cooking family meals for everybody. If someone needs to go somewhere– we have Amish neighbors who ride horses and buggies and if they need to go far into town for doctor's appointment, we drive them.They come use our phones if they need to. We exchange produce with our neighbors. We do skill sharing. Everything is fully shared here. What's so phenomenal about where this community is situated is that we're in a very conservative, red part of the state. My friends who live here full time are very engaged in the community.They're first responders, firefighters, on the town planning board, very deeply engaged as community care, very progressive people in this otherwise conservative place. And just that exposure alone; we know several people who just voted Democrat for the first time in their entire lives.

[00:33:17] Emily Race: And aside from these labels of “Democrat”, what do you actually think is the shift in their voting? 

[00:33:23] Sarah Vitti: I don't actually identify as Democrat or Republican, right? But it does matter how we vote in terms of harm reduction. To be able to move someone who's been a lifelong Republican voter, especially in Trump country– our neighbors literally have Trump signs up and he hasn't been president for how long? I think the shift is that people who fall into and believe narratives around what it means to be “liberal” and “progressive” and these buzzwords like “community”, And even the word “care” sometimes, there are a lot of right-wing people who hear those words and they just don't wanna hear any of it.They think it means something else. So now they're seeing it in practice and they wanna be a part of it. They come to our festival, they volunteer in stuff we do and arts programming we put on, and they meet the artists who are up here. 

We do pizza Friday out on our farm stand by the road every Friday.It's donation based. People drive by and stop and get to meet this diverse group of people that they otherwise wouldn't meet. I think it's just in that community, it's very tight-knit, and we are modeling what it looks like to show love and to take care of one another and to be free in many ways, which we are here, and everyone who comes here feels that

I think people who come from other ideologies come here and they see that and they see who we really are and what it really looks like to take care of one another. O course, there are side conversations that people are having and sometimes they get a little political, but it's not really about that.he less we talk politics with the people around this community, the more their mindsets and ideologies have shifted just from sharing space with them and inviting them into our world without judgment. Yeah, we can judge, I'm going to judge you if you say something crazy, but I'm also gonna have a conversation with you about that, right?

[00:35:34] Emily Race: If I were to summarize what you're saying there, what you just described as the modeling, it starts with this behavior in caring for others around you. You talked about being engaged in the community and then from there it has this very, just comforting, ripple effect I imagine.And some of these more polarizing parts of our identities, or things that have gotten created over time through the media, fade away into the background and we can have more of a human experience with one another. That's so beautiful. 

In terms of the intergenerational piece, which was actually something that drew me to Caring Across Generations when I first heard of what you all are doing ‘cause I'm like, “wow, we really do need more intergenerational experiences, spaces, places to learn from another” and what would be born from just sharing space with one another. Do you have anything to speak to about how that may come up in the work you all are doing?

[00:36:27] Sarah Vitti: Yeah, we talk about intergenerational relationships all the time. Again, in many cultures outside of the US– but also because the US includes many cultures from around the world, and a lot of people who immigrate to the US don't, again, have access to the kinds of care that a lot of other people have access to– it is totally normal for most of the world and a lot of people in this country to live in intergenerational homes. And then you have a built-in care system. You have childcare from the grandparents, if they're able, at least to some extent, and then as they're aging, you have multiple people able to take care of them. They're with their families, where they wanna be, or they're right next door. Going back to the village-like component and makeup of a lot of communities. I grew up that way. My family all immigrated from Italy and my grandmother either was gonna live with us, or my cousins. She went with my cousins because they had more space. So, my cousins grew up with my grandmother, and my aunt was a single mom. So having my grandmother there was invaluable, right? It was absolutely necessary. And then as she aged, everyone was there to take care of her and take care of her in the home. 

[00:37:45] Emily Race: It's beautiful. Again, I'm brought back to what you said about individualism. It feels like the enemy of what you're describing in a sense, If we were to have enemies, if we were to use that language. I've talked about this with my own family and friends; you see this separation of, like, my immediate family, is spread out in all these different states, and if I wanted to be with them, it requires paying for airfare and or extensive road travel. That's difficult. It seems to just be normalized in the United States, maybe more so in the dominant white culture, maybe not in other subcultures within us. 

[00:38:16] Sarah Vitti: Yeah, totally. Again, going back to ageism being a huge barrier to our understanding of the value of aging people and older adults and this, again goes back to capitalism, right? Disabled people and elderly people are considered “unproductive” people in society; maybe you can't be a part of the workforce, then they're “not worth anything.”

It's incredibly fucked up on a human level. And it's not true. 

There are psychological studies that have shown that putting kid children and elderly people in the same space is really beneficial for both and can extend the life of the aging person.

And, also our culture is so afraid of death and dying, that it's almost like we don't want to spend time with the aging people in our lives because it scares us.

[00:39:07] Emily Race: So heartbreaking. 

[00:39:09] Sarah Vitti: It's heartbreaking. That's when you should be wanting to, and also able to, be there.

Unfortunately, our lack of care infrastructure prevents a lot of people from being able to be there at their loved one's end of life. 

[00:39:23] Emily Race: I'm making an assumption, but, if you're a working person and then you wanna care for someone in your family, are you saying from that lens, or are there other factors?

[00:39:31] Sarah Vitti: Yeah. If you don't have paid leave and your parent is dying, the choices that people have to make. Lower-class people, people living in poverty or working-class people, do not have the option to take a week off or two weeks or a month off from work, even a day, sometimes to be with their loved ones in the most precious moments. And that's why paid leave is huge.

There are three huge prongs of the care ecosystem. Childcare, paid leave, and home and community-based services, because they all have to happen together. We realized about a decade ago that we can't be fighting separate fights; we are one, it's one, it's an ecosystem, and we need all of the components.

[00:40:18] Emily Race: My last question before we wrap things up is around both on the policy front and the cultural narrative part; I'm imagining the voices that are included in this process are really important, right? My assumption is you would need to hear from the folks who need care directly, what type of care they need, and what that looks like. 

Can you speak at all to what that looks like in terms of hearing from different voices, and how you approach them? 

[00:40:44] Sarah Vitti: Yeah. There are a lot of avenues in the history of Caring Across the, when it was first founded, Ai-jen always knew that there needed to be an investment in storytelling and narrative change work.

And so they actually founded the organization and started by going across the country and hosting “Care Congresses”, which were basically listening sessions with caregivers and care workers and people who receive care all across the country to hear, “What are your experiences? What are representations of your experience that are awful to see? What kinds of representations do you wanna see?”

That's how the organization started. And then of course since then, over the past decade, we've done tons of research and are constantly talking to caregivers and building what we call “the caring majority”, which is care workers, unpaid family caregivers, and those they care for.

As an organization, we have a Care Fellows program that my amazing colleague Aisha runs. Aisha is also a full-time caregiver to both of her parents as an only child and works at Caring Across full-time. Many of my colleagues are full-time caregivers, and we work at an organization that makes a lot of space for that and has incredible policies to support that.

Which is very unique, but again, modeling what we wanna see in the world. 

[00:42:02] Emily Race: Totally. 

[00:42:03] Sarah Vitti: So we have the experiences and insights of our colleagues every single day in the work that we're doing. We have the Care Fellows program, which Aisha runs. Every year we run a new cohort where, if you're a former or current unpaid family caregiver, you apply to the fellowship program and it's like a training program on how to advocate for yourself, talk to the press, write op-eds, put your own story out there, and also fight for policy solutions. And we do oftentimes include the Care Fellows in some of the more creative culture change stuff we're doing.

So for instance, the last two years we did a couple of rounds of commissions with visual artists to visualize through illustration and painting what a caring future looks like. And we actually hosted a briefing for the artists with the Care Fellows so that they could hear directly from people's first experiences to inspire the work.

And inevitably what happens 99% of the time we go into any room and talk about care is every single person has their own care story and just has never thought about it before. So that's the other thing is we all have care stories. Whether we were the primary caregiver or we watched someone else do that work, we all have care stories.

[00:43:19] Emily Race: I have chills hearing that. Cause it's, Yeah, now I'm like, oh my gosh, I wanna dive into those for myself and hear from other people too.

[00:43:26] Sarah Vitti: I'm two years into working at this organization and I still sometimes have little light bulb moments of, “Oh wow. That also happened in my life with my family.”

That's part of the work that we're doing, is putting this out there, showing people that care is all around us at all times, and it makes everything else function around us.

And the people doing it need to be visualized. In storylines, in pop culture, in national media, in the books we read, in the video games we play, everything that touches everybody. 

[00:44:09] Emily Race: Maybe that is part of the inquiry or the action you wanna leave folks with, but I am curious, for anyone listening, what could they do or think about as they leave this conversation?

[00:44:19] Sarah Vitti: Yeah that's exactly it. I would love for people to walk away from this conversation reflecting on how care has shown up in their lives. Whether it's a time that they've needed care, even if it's not a disability or a severe illness. We've all needed care as children and a lot of us have needed care in terms of connection through mental health struggles and seeking therapy and all different kinds of care that people need across the lifespan.

So think broadly and reflect on how it's shown up in your life or in people who you know, their lives. Think about the kind of world as you age, as you maybe start your own family, or as your parents are aging and you're wondering “what's their plan?” Have these conversations with your partner, with your children, and with your friends. “Hey, our parents are getting old. Have you talked to your mom about…?” I've been talking to my friends about my own fears, being one of two children with a mother that we both have to care for, and neither of us is really in a place in our lives where we're prepared. And we don't have to right now because she's healthy, but she's aging.

[00:45:29] Emily Race: And change happens at any time. 

[00:45:31] Sarah Vitti: And change happens at any time.

And thinking about how you wanna grow old in this world and when you are old and need care or sick and need care, what do you want that to look like? What do you want that to feel like? What do you want to be accessible to you? 

[00:45:47] Emily Race: For me a takeaway is, honoring all different phases of a life cycle through community care. Not doing that on your own in private but in a communal way. And it's just so beautiful.

I'm so grateful for the work you're specifically doing at Caring Across Generations. What Caring Across is doing, as a collective. I also love that we tied The Root into this because it is such a beautiful example of what a community of care looks like.

Thank you for being with us. Is there any way folks could collaborate with you or support what Caring Across is doing moving forward? 

[00:46:20] Sarah Vitti: Yeah, I think the best way is to just follow our work. If you do that, you'll see all of the opportunities where you can take action on policy. Our issue and the care ecosystem have been a huge part of Biden's Build Back Better Plan. It's been gutted and gutted at every single step of the way, so we still have a huge fight ahead of us, but, they're using our language and they're talking about our policies that we have shaped with our coalition partners.

Follow us, sign up for our email list and follow us on social media.Those are the two best things you can do. And if you do that, we will tell you when we need your help. We will tell you when it's time to take action. And you can keep up with all of the cool work we're doing with artists and in the entertainment industry and all of the other cool, fun things that we're doing.

Even just following us passively is a great way to start shifting the way that we think individually about care every day and how it shows up. 

[00:47:22] Emily Race: Amazing. Will do, and I think everyone should now go and have these conversations with the people in your life. This has been so inspiring.

Thank you again. 

[00:47:32] Sarah Vitti: Thank you, Emily. 

[00:47:36] Emily Race: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Founding Mothers podcast. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Emily Race, and edited by Eric Weisberg. If you wanna support the show, please leave us a rating or share this episode with the important people in your life.

I'd also love to hear from you. If you or someone you know would be a great guest to share about their vision for the world, you can email emily@founding-mothers.com. Or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast.