Aging in America News

| Part I of Our Q&A with Anna Wadia and Kevin Prindiville
| Mark Swartz

| Anna Wadia is executive director of The CARE Fund, which is a collaborative fund that is bringing together foundations across the care continuum, including aging and disability care, paid family and medical leave, early care and education, and quality care jobs to pool resources to power the care movement. In part I of this two-part conversation, Aging in America News founder Mark Swartz speaks to Wadia and Kevin Prindiville, executive director of Justice in Aging, which helps older adults to access affordable health care, economic security, and the courts. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Read part II

Mark Swartz: Anna, in your August op-ed in the Courier-News, you make a bold assertion: “Care isn’t just policy. It’s survival. It’s resistance. And its unifying force must also be our strategy.” Can you say more about that?

Anna Wadia: We will only win transformative change in our care systems if we build power together. As long as we’re divided, we will be conquered. We need significant public resources in order to solve our care crisis. And we will never win those public resources unless we build power together. 

We will never win those public resources unless we build power together. 

–Anna Wadia

How is the CARE Fund adapting and responding to the current landscape?

Wadia: In this moment, the CARE Fund is adapting in three interlocking ways, which are all rooted in our core values of respect, equity, and cross-movement solidarity.

• First, we’re deepening and expanding our commitment to coalition and solidarity work. A great example is the way that care advocates are working with immigrant rights advocates to preserve access to care services and support, and to protect spaces in our communities that provide care to children, older adults and people with disabilities. And to safeguard the rights and the jobs of care workers. The care workforce is disproportionately made up of women of color and immigrants. This cross-movement solidarity not only protects our families and our care programs, but it’s also what we need to build the power for future wins. And what all of the scholars of countries that have backslid from democracy into authoritarianism have pointed out is that cross-movement solidarity is essential for protecting democracy.
• Second, we’re staying anchored to our founding principles even as we flex to new threats. We launched the CARE Fund with the understanding that care is at the crux of systems of oppression by gender, race, age, ability, immigration status, family structure. And so equity demands a holistic approach. And I’m really proud that we baked our values into our name. The CARE Fund stands for the Care for All with Respect and Equity Fund. And we’re not changing that. 

Equity demands a holistic approach

–Anna Wadia

• Third, we’re resourcing our grantees to continue to push for a bold vision for the care we need even as they are fighting just one defensive battle or another to preserve what we have. Ai-Jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and director of Caring Across Generations, just wrote a really good piece in the Nation on that. 

How about you, Kevin?

Kevin Prindiville: We also have three strategies: 

• Defending the programs and the people who rely on programs. Older adults rely on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and the Older Americans Act to meet their basic needs. So we need to defend those programs and defend people’s right to access services in those programs.
• Building policy for the future. That means making counterproposals and making proposals that go beyond where we’ve ever been before. We know that the systems that have existed haven’t served our communities fully and as well as we would like. 

Systems that have existed haven’t served our communities fully and as well as we would like

–Kevin Prindiville

• Supporting older adults at the local level and state level to advocate for themselves, to raise their needs with policymakers so that issues of aging and care are part of the conversation and are front of mind for policy makers, so that we can more effectively defend programs that are at risk and so we can advance and strengthen those programs when there are opportunities to do that too. 

So it’s defend, build policy, and build power, and they all operate together. None of them work without the other. And if they’re all working, then they all become more effective and lead us. I think we’ve been in this posture of feeling like so much has changed so fast and there’s so much to think about defending, but we also have to be providing a positive vision for where we want to take things as leaders in our communities and as we hear from our communities about what they need. 

Could you describe the situation of someone who depends on the safety net, and what the scenarios look like for that person as all of these supports are being sort of knocked out from under them?

Prindiville: When an older person loses access to these core benefits, there really aren’t good alternatives. The programs that we’re talking about and that have gotten a lot of attention in the last nine months, Medicaid and Medicare and social security, these are programs that help people meet the most basic of needs. Medicare is how you pay for the visit to the doctor, how you fill a prescription at the pharmacy for a lifesaving medication for an ambulance ride at the hospital, and Medicaid is paying for that home care worker to come to your home. Or Social Security, for most people on it, is their only source of income, and therefore it’s the way they pay for food and rent. And if they lose attachment to any of those things, there’s no safety net for the safety net. 

There’s no safety net for the safety net. 

Kevin Prindivlle

When I talked to Alison Barkoff, I was expecting to wallow in misery and she was like, No, you don’t get it. There’s a lot of good work going on. We’re standing up where we can. There are lawsuits. It’s not just throwing our hands up. So I’m looking for you to offer further evidence that it’s not all going to hell. 

Wadia: There are many ways in which the CARE Fund’s grantees are pushing back, Justice in Aging being one great example. At the federal level, there’s continued advocacy to undo some of the most draconian cuts to programs like Medicaid. While states can never make up for the shortfall from the federal government, very wealthy individuals and corporations are receiving massive federal tax cuts. So that  can be an opening for states to increase taxes and raise revenue to make up for some of the cuts. There’s also a ton of organizing going on in rural communities and with working-class families who have not necessarily been part of the care movement in the past.

Mark Swartz is the founder of Aging in America News. Read part II of this conversation.