Making Caring Count September Newsletter Issue 3#8

Trends and innovations

Ianacare: the game-changing healthtech platform bridging the gap in home-based care and empowering family caregivers. Ianacare is a Boston-based integrated platform for family caregivers to organize and mobilize care. The company offers an all-in-one support platform that enables caregivers to communicate directly with other family members, request help with certain tasks, and receive support from an Ianacare “Caregiver Coach”. The healthtech platform also helps connect users with local resources by providing basic location information, allowing users to gain access to personalized lists of services and healthcare support options within their area. Ianacare provides its services on the ianacare app available on both iOS and Android devices. bit.ly/3MwiLbW

News from Africa.

South African study reveals that parents who believe their children can have a better future are more likely to read and play with them. According to Unicef data, an estimated 40% of homes in South Africa lack children’s books. In the community of Sweetwaters, South Africa, that number gets up to 83%. iThemba Projects, a non-profit organization founded two decades ago, works with Sweetwaters to provide educational and mentoring opportunities. The organization’s child development intervention encourages parents to read to, play with and talk with their children, regardless of age, to change their beliefs about their children’s potential. It aims to instill hope in a community with limited access to early childhood education. Home mentors support families who signed up for an early childhood development intervention by swapping puzzles and stories and providing resourceful activities for children and caregivers. A collaborative paper involving a research team from the US and iThemba set out to understand how parental beliefs and behaviours changed throughout the intervention and what best explained their progress. They found that parenting interventions that encourage nurturing care are effective in improving the early development of children. They also found that parents who believed their children could have a better future than them were more likely to read and play with them. bit.ly/3MvNkPg

News that made headlines

U.S Vice President Kamala Harris announces sweeping economic plan to provide new benefits to new parents. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris unveiled a sweeping economic plan that includes expanding the child tax credit to provide up to $6,000 in tax relief during the first year of a child’s life. Harris’ plan intends to bring back the higher child tax credit established by the American Rescue Plan in 2021, with a maximum credit of $3,600 per child. This proposed tax relief would benefit middle- to lower-income families for one year after their child is born. According to Columbia University analysis, the child poverty rate fell to a historic 5.2% in 2021, owing primarily to the credit’s expansion. Harris’ proposal will come with a heftier price tag, with the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimating the expansion to $6,000 for newborns could cost $100 billion. However, Harris is committed to her plan, which she believes is vital for supporting American families. Her economic plan also calls for higher taxes on large corporations and wealthy Americans to support these initiatives. bit.ly/4cVezNM

News from around the world

A childcare cooperative in Ahmedabad, India has become a lifeline for women working in the informal economy. Many women from low-income households in India need to work to provide for their families but lack a support system to help them do so. They are typically forced to take their children along with them to their workplaces, where children are exposed to hazardous conditions, and older siblings are often tasked with looking after the younger children, disrupting their education. The absence of flexible, quality childcare facilities is a significant barrier to gender equality in job markets. In response, the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), the largest central trade union in India, established Sangini Child Care Cooperatives in Ahmed, India, for informal workers to address this issue. The centers are open to children from three months to six years, and have been lifeline for mothers, allowing them to work more days and contribute to their household income. Additionally, local residents who are unemployed and eager to learn new skills are offered free training sessions to become childcare workers. The centers provide a decent wage and access to social protection and also ensure that the children receive proper nutrition and health care as well as preschool education. The centers are mostly run by the community and the mothers who send their children there are the shareholders. bit.ly/4gbnayy

What we’re reading

Working While Caring: Innovations and Interventions to Support Caregivers in the Workplace. With the United States trending towards an older population and more people living with chronic health conditions and disabilities, there is an increasing demand for caregiving assistance. In 2022,the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers (RCI), published Invisible Overtime, a guide for employers on caregiving in America and opportunities for improving supports for employees who are or will become caregivers. This latest report, Working While Caring ?is a follow-on to Invisible Overtime and describes how one group of employers in southeast Michigan collaborated to: raise their own awareness of the issues facing employees who are working while caregiving, identify options for supporting current and future caregivers, and develop fit for purpose, practical? solutions. It presents a variety of steps that employers can take to create a more caregiver-friendly work environment and community such as: normalizing caregiving by engaging leadership in showing support for caregivers and reducing stigma; establishing an employee caregiving interest group representing a diverse range of caregivers and other stakeholders; training managers on policies and procedures relevant to caregivers, and collaborating with local and regional business groups’ efforts to identify gaps in caregiver benefits and services, thereby creating guidelines for a minimum benefits package. bit.ly/3MuI7qI

Something to think about

Ten rules on the art of care by Courtney Martin. Caregiving is a universal experience and it will affect all of us at one point. This beautifully written piece by Courtney Martin, author and co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and FRESH Speakers, serves as a guidepost for caregivers who often find themselves overwhelmed while caring for their loved ones.

1. Pay exquisite attention. Less to what they say and more to what their energy teaches you about what makes them feel fed, depleted and deflated, seen, celebrated, safe.

2. The attention will offer you a pattern. Patterns of care are a rhythm of energy and offerings. It is pattern keeping, not problem solving, that is the real basic unit of artful caregiving.

3. The pattern, honored will lead to trust

4. The trust is deepened, not by perfection, but by a rejection of perfection altogether. The caretaker is not perfect. The person being cared for is not perfect. Start from there.

5. You will care for the human that needs to teach you something.

6. Care is collaborative art.

7. When care is manual labor, scan for delight

8. If you are laughing, you are doing something right

9. There is actually no binary in care. There are no fixed roles in the changing patterns of a life of care

10. The ephemeral art of care is your legacy. ?bit.ly/3Z86nXm

?Thanks for reading our September Issue!

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