Caring Across Generations (CAG) is an American national coalition of caregivers and care recipients, with a mission "to change our culture and policy in America to value and support caregiving". CAG was founded in 2011 by Sarita Gupta and Ai-jen Poo to address the rapidly rising number of Americans in long-term care and the shortage of home care workers.[1] [2] One of CAG's original goals is to help create two million quality caregiving jobs in the United States.
According to Poo, who had been working on care issues in the years following the 2008 economic crisis, “we thought, There’s a jobs crisis, there’s a care crisis. We should create millions of quality jobs in homecare. Caregivers will benefit. Care receivers will benefit. Everyone is touched by it. Let’s do it!”
CAG advocates for government assistance for the estimated 53 million unpaid caregivers, such as family members, in the US, who provide an estimated $600 billion of unpaid care annually. According to CAG, the financial and other costs of long-term care that families face is ""beyond a crisis point ... It's been a rolling crisis and we're at a catastrophic point."[3]
From 2018 to 2020, CAG participate in Lead Local, a research project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, examining community power and community power-building in health care. The unusual research approach teamed CAG and three other non-academic organizations, Change Elemental, Human Impact Partners, Right to the City Alliance, with university academics from Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute, University of Southern California (USC) Equity Research Institute, and Vanderbilt University. Each party brought its own theories of community power-building, and all collaborated on research design and case study selection.[4]
The CAG-led Care Can't Wait coalition of social justice and labor organizations, founded in 2020, seeks to build a robust federal care infrastructure. Labor unions involved include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).[5] [6]