Community-Based Caregiving Initiative
Aging with Dignity, Working with Purpose
California faces a dual crisis: rising senior care needs and a shortage of qualified caregivers. This labor shortage is driven by poor pay and difficult working conditions in the care sector, despite the critical role it serves in all of our lives.
The Community-Based Caregiving Initiative (CCI) reimagines caregiving as a respected public health profession—integrated into national, state, and local public health strategies, informed by lived experience, and supported by equitable workforce policies.
Informed by community-centered research conducted with caregivers, care recipients, and health providers across San Francisco, CCI addresses documented system gaps and structural barriers that too often cause workforce programs to reproduce low-wage, unstable work rather than true economic mobility. Culturally congruent care practices, policy engagement, and community leadership development all play a critical role in CCI’s approach to advancing health equity, improving outcomes for older adults and people with disabilities, and building a replicable model for workforce transformation across public health sectors and geographies.
Through an 18-month demonstration project, CCI cross-sector partners RepresentEd Leadership, George Davis Senior Center, Homebridge, San Francisco In-Home Support Services Authority, San Francisco State University School of Nursing, the Bay Area Black Nurses Association, and Black Female Project, will train and support up to 70 caregivers as frontline public health workers, equipped not only with technical skills but also leadership capacity to inform policy, partner with governmental public health leaders, and advocate for equity-focused decisions that strengthen the health system as a whole.
In addition to demonstrating a reimagined community-based caregiving workforce ecosystem, CCI convenes a Community-based Caregiving Task Force of caregiving and elder health industry leaders, funders, and policy experts to coordinate the scaling of equitable caregiving workforce models across the Bay Area and beyond, and identify key policy levers that advance caregiving as essential public health work including influencing how workforce development and public health agencies invest in care.