Aidaly is a startup whose mission it is to help family caregivers get paid for their work.
Update 3/27: A previous version of this story erroneously stated there were 3 million caregivers in the United States. There are in fact 38 million caregivers.
Those who read the column with regularity may recall the interview I did in November with Bachelor alum and former broadcast journalist Sarah Trott. Her late father was diagnosed with ALS, colloquially known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. After realizing her mom was in dire need of help, she left her weekend anchor position at the ABC affiliate in Palm Desert, California in 2019 to pitch in at home.
It was a fateful decision that would alter the course of her life.
Trott used her modicum of celebrity and her lived experiences to, with the power of social media, help empower other young women caregivers who may need support—practical and/or emotional—in coping with the stresses of caring for a family member or other loved one. “I had so much love for my dad and [wanted] to provide his care that we kind of jumped in to help with [the things] he could no longer do for himself,” Trott said of diving headfirst into the caregiver life.
A few months after that initial interview, Trott recently sat down with me again virtually to discuss her new role as director of digital marketing at Aidaly. Aidaly is a company whose mission it is to, according to its website, “help every family caregiver get paid.” The idea is simple: caregiving is a full-time job and providers should rightfully be compensated for their time, blood be damned. On its site, Aidaly states caregivers provided more than 34 billion hours of care in 2020, worth up to $470 billion to the economy. There are pathways for people to be compensated for their duties, but they aren’t easy to navigate and set atop archaic infrastructure unreflective of this digitally dominated era. Thus, it’s part of Aidaly’s mission to help caregivers recoup that time and money by empowering them to “provide care in the home by improving accessibility of existing benefits.”
The Miami-based startup has seen funding from high-profile investors as Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, amongst others. In June of last year, it was reported Aidaly secured $8.5M in venture capital led by Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six.
“It’s really exceptional to see such high-profile investors see this cultural shift of [needing to] recognize and support family caregivers and that family caregiving is a real job,” Trott said. “It’s capital W work. The care that spouses or loved ones provide for one another… you can put a number on just how much the value is.”
Trott cited the aforementioned statistics about what caregivers contribute to the economy. As she emphasized, $470 billion isn’t a trivial number. She went on to say there are more than 38 million caregivers in the United States, telling me all the figures are research-based, backed by organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons and the National Alliance on Caregiving. In a nutshell, Trott said Aidaly’s raison d’être is really about “coming together and thinking something needs to be done about this to compensate family caregivers and make it easier to access the financial compensation caregivers deserve.”
Asked why she chose to join Aidaly, Trott replied it was about the mission.
She explained being struck by the company’s mission in “pioneering” a new way of looking at family caregiving with an embrace of today’s digital-first modalities. “In a modern age, we’re no longer in the days of, ‘Here’s a pamphlet and go in person and go try to talk to this person.’ There’s so many broken government systems that hinder a caregiver’s journey to receive compensation,” she said of the current state of affairs in caregiving. “Aidaly is trying to make that process easier. I saw that experience from my mom, who is a teacher… how difficult the financial strain was on our family personally during our caregiving journey, what that looks like and how that can be amplified in so many different scenarios. If you have a lot of other financial struggles and challenges or [are] low income, things like that, there’s so many barriers. I experienced that. I was drawn to Aidaly for all those reasons.”
Aidaly founder and CEO Maggie Norris seconded the need for modernization.
“In the world of ChatGPT, where artificial intelligence can argue case law for you, there’s no reason why health systems are sending a caregiver home with a binder full of pamphlets,” she said to me in a brief interview via email. “The rate of innovation in other industries is far ahead of innovation in the caregiving space.”
She added: “We have the technology to provide meaningful support in the home.”
Norris’s path to caring about caregiving runs parallel to Trott’s. She has experience as a caregiver twice, once for her dad and once for her stepdad. The choice to start Aidaly mirrors much of why Trott joined—she wanted to help caregivers, for all intents and purposes, gain some respect. As mentioned, the current system for caregivers is a convoluted web of ideas that’s hard to untangle. For Norris, caring for her family meant facing numerous professional and especially financial setbacks like not paying into Social Security or getting medical insurance. “Having been a caregiver to both my dad and stepdad at two different times in my life, I understand the struggles and setbacks caregivers face,” Norris said of her lived experience in the caretaker realm. “Especially having been a young woman embarking on my career and balancing serious family responsibilities.”
The stories from Trott and Norris are particularly apt to tell now given March is Women’s History Month. To wit, the caregiving industry is one dominated by women. Norris told me research has shown two-thirds, or 66%, of caregivers are women, adding the average person is 49 years of age. This person, she said, works outside the house and “provides 20 hours per week of unpaid care to her mother.”
Norris called the economic data “staggering” and noted women are disproportionately affected by what she termed the “financial strains and shocks” associated with caregiver life. Moreover, many “choose to leave the workforce or halt their careers entirely” similar to what Trott sacrificed for her father’s sake.
Looking long-term, Trott said the overarching goal for Aidaly is really just raise awareness. Caregivers are in short supply, she told me, and “we know the cost of care to support people is going to significantly increase” due to the preponderance of people in the United States being diagnosed with chronic health conditions.
“We [Aidaly] want to put these tools in place to empower family caregivers before it’s too late,” Trott said of her company’s main long-term goal. “That’s a big reason as well why I want to be part of this change. We’re talking about what is a family caregiver: we’re labeling it, we’re acknowledging that people who provide care in the home. Many people think, ‘Well, I’m just taking care of my spouse, I’m doing my duty as a wife or as a daughter.’ But really what it is is actual work—you’re putting in significant hours [into] the kind of care that you’re providing can be compensated. It’s just a mindset shift [that must collectively happen] that [caregiving] is valuable work and your time does deserve to be compensated through many different avenues out there. It’s a matter of making those accessible and understandable to all sorts of people from all different backgrounds.”
As I wrote in Trott’s original interview last fall, the reason caregiving is so pertinent to accessibility, assistive technology, and disability lies in the way they are interconnected. Caregiving can be as disabling in its own right, physically and emotionally, for the giver as whatever condition the taker has. To Trott’s point, this deserves to be recognized. Likewise in terms of harnessing technology’s power for good, startups like Aidaly are hellbent on making educational resources more accessible in a modernized, easily digestible format for caregivers everywhere.
To reiterate Norris’s point, the technology exists to provide meaningful change.
