The Caregiving Project for Older Americans

The United States is in the midst of a significant and growing caregiving crisis. About 1.4 million older Americans live in nursing homes, nearly 6 million receive care at home, and significant numbers go completely without the help they need. And the growing disparity between the demand and supply of caregiving services will only worsen with the aging of baby boomers in this country.

Developing a National Systemic Approach

The Caregiving Project for Older Americans is an action-oriented collaboration that aims to improve the nation’s caregiving workforce through training, the establishment of standards, and the creation of a career ladder.

Launched in 2006 jointly with the Schmieding Center for Senior Health & Education, the effort combines the talents of our policy research center with a clinical outpatient and health education program to:

bring greater awareness of the caregiving crisis
develop a national systemic approach to recruiting, training and retaining paid professional caregivers
enhance the key role of this new generation of caregivers

Accelerating Professional Caregiver Training

Since 2007, The Caregiving Project and the MetLife Foundation awarded twenty-four U.S. community colleges grants to develop home-based caregiver training courses. Each selected community college was awarded up to $25,000. The grants provide funding to community colleges to either:

establish new home-based caregiver training programs
enhance programs that already exist for professional and family caregivers

Documenting the Growing Caregiving Crisis

A comprehensive report produced by The Caregiving Project, entitled "Caregiving in America", documents the growing caregiving crisis in our country—the fact that, increasingly, there are too few caregivers, both paid and unpaid, and too many people needing care. Among the major topics covered are:

who provides care, and where
the burden on family caregivers
the severe shortage of paid caregivers
barriers to affordable, quality care

More Work To Be Done

Ongoing initiatives of The Caregiving Project include convening a national caregiving summit and conducting a series of national caregiving surveys. Improving the availability of affordable, quality care for those who need it is our goal, and we recognize that when it comes to solving the growing caregiving crisis, there is still more work to be done.