Think about a time when you or someone you loved needed support due to illness, disability, or aging. Who provided it? What would you have done without that care? What did it cost? What motivated the caregivers to offer support?
Liv Mendelsohn (Executive Leadership, Cohort III) recently sat down with us for an interview about her work at the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence, a program of the Azrieli Foundation. Liv’s work in caregiving has also grown through relationships formed at Mandel, including her ongoing collaboration with fellow Cohort III graduate Shelley Rood Wernick, who leads the Center on Aging, Trauma, and Holocaust Survivor Care at the Jewish Federations of North America.
Caregiving is unpaid work taken on by friends, family, and neighbors supporting those with needs related to aging, disability, or health. They opt into this work because of existing relationships or because the work provides meaning. There is also paid work offered by care providers (the direct care workforce in the US), people who often work in difficult conditions and receive low compensation. For Liv, support for caregivers is a “demographic imperative.” Longer lives, medical progress, and greater inclusion of disabled people are all signs of a society moving in the right direction. But these developments also require our systems to evolve. As Liv argues, the challenge is not that more people need care; it is that the systems designed to support care have not yet kept pace with this progress.
For every hour of healthcare provided in Canada, unpaid caregivers provide three hours. What’s more, “nearly half of caregivers report financial strain or negative financial impacts from caregiving.” Liv wants people to understand caregiving for what it is: essential work that holds together our health, social, and economic systems. Were caregivers to go on strike, society could not function as normal. And while caregiving is often offered benevolently and can be personally meaningful, it is a challenge for those providing it.
At the Centre, Liv is building infrastructure to support a future in which caregivers and care providers have the institutional, political, and societal backing they need. She believes caregiving is sacred work deeply entwined with Jewish teachings and obligations, though the work she does is for all Canadians. Liv shared that the Centre is a convener and a sector-builder that brings together leaders working across disability, health care, illness and aging—fields that are deeply interconnected but have too often worked in isolation:
“The goal is to create the conditions for major organizations, community partners, and people with lived experience to come together, align their efforts, and act collectively. Through the Azrieli Foundation, we fund beyond pilot programs, constructing infrastructure for coalitions to come together—not just around broad policy goals, but around specific pieces of work we advance together.”
The Centre is also an advocacy organization which has developed a National Caregiving Strategy. Informed by thousands of consultations across the country, including, crucially, consultations with caregivers and care providers, the strategy now has endorsements from over 65 organizations. Liv views the strategy as a mechanism to provide a shared understanding of caregiving in Canada and the tools to mobilize for policy change. Specific policies the Centre is championing include caregiver leave reform, income supports and tax credits for caregivers, disability-benefit improvements, and higher wages for care providers.
Liv stressed the importance of working simultaneously on two timelines—immediate support for caregivers and long-term systems change:
“We know that caregivers cannot wait for conditions to improve while we work on sector building and systems change together with members of parliament and government ministers. That is why the Centre pairs long-term advocacy with immediate investment in mental health, resilience, navigation and other practical supports for caregivers.”
What was perhaps most striking in our conversation was Liv’s explanation of the purposes that drive her work. While she is not working exclusively within Jewish communities, she draws inspiration from Rabbi and philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik’s distinction between the covenant of fate, brit goral, and the covenant of destiny, brit ye’ud. She shared, “we are shaped not only by the circumstances and histories we inherit, but also by the responsibilities we choose to undertake and the future we build together.” Liv sees the creation of “social infrastructure” for caregivers through this lens: as a collective obligation and a choice about the kind of society we want to become. Care makes it possible for people to participate in work, community, and democracy. “Without the enormous contribution of those providing largely invisible and unpaid care,” she says, “none of that is possible.”
-Andrew Barnwell: Senior Program Associate, Mandel Institute