The Help Project

A new national report card just graded every state on care.
Not schools.
Not roads.
Care: child care, aging and disability services, paid leave, and protections for family caregivers.
29 states scored a D or lower.
Only 12 earned a B− or better.
California, Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey led.
Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming, Florida, and North Carolina failed outright.
This is not abstract. Aging and disability care runs largely on Medicaid, and Medicaid is where last year's federal cuts landed hardest. States are already trimming home and community-based services, the exact programs that let someone age at home instead of forcing a family member into full-time unpaid care.
Every point a state loses on that report card gets absorbed somewhere. Usually by an employee who quietly starts missing meetings, turns down a promotion, or cuts back to part-time. Your HR data will never say "state Medicaid cut." It will just say attrition.
PS. Your state's grade tells you the policy landscape. The Workplace Caregiver Needs Survey tells you what's actually happening inside your own walls. Confidential, five minutes per person, covers up to 20 employees. You get a Caregiver Risk Score and the estimated cost of doing nothing, built from your team's own answers, not a national average. $127. https://www.help-project.com/caregiver-survey-sales-page

Your caregivers don't know they're caregivers ‼️

New data from Care.com just confirmed something HR keeps missing. Only 37% of employees who are already providing elder or child care call themselves caregivers.

If someone won't name the role, they will never ask for the benefit built for it.

👉 Meanwhile, only 30% of employers offer any family caregiver leave, and most of those cap it under 3 weeks.
👉 2/3 of women juggling both generations say what is offered doesn't come close to meeting their needs.

Here's what I tell every HR team I work with: "Your employees aren't ignoring this benefit. They don't know it's for them. Employees can't use a benefit for a role they haven't identified themselves as holding.

Fix the language before you fix the plan.

Ask managers to say the word "caregiving" out loud in one-on-ones, and watch how many hands quietly go up.

Where in your benefits language could you replace "wellness support" with something an actual caregiver would recognize as meant for them?

PS. I have worked with teams where a single 90-minute workshop changed how managers responded to caregiving employees for good. If you want to know what that looks like, send me a message.

New survey data from LegalShield says nearly nine in ten HR executives believe caregiving already has a major impact on absenteeism and productivity at their company.
Only 37% feel confident their current benefits actually meet elder care needs.
Put those two numbers side by side. Almost everyone in HR already sees the problem. Barely a ⅓ believe what they built is built to solve it.
The coverage gaps explain why. Voluntary elder care benefits cover employees' own parents only 37% of the time. Parents-in-law, just as likely to end up in an employee's spare bedroom, are covered 24% of the time. In 17% of companies, employees have already asked for parent coverage by name and been told no.
The real issue is a mapping problem. The benefit exists somewhere in the plan document, but nobody connected it to the person actually managing a parent's care right now.
I read workforces for exactly this gap, the distance between what a company already pays for and what its caregiving employees can actually use.
PS. If you can't answer that question, the Workplace Caregiver Needs Survey can. Confidential, five minutes per person, up to 20 employees. You get a Caregiver Risk Score and an estimated cost of inaction in real dollars, from your own team's answers rather than an industry average. $127. Link in the first comment. https://www.help-project.com/caregiver-survey-tool

Family caregivers just got an exemption they can't use ‼️

Starting July 31, new federal Medicaid rules require enrollees to prove eighty hours a month of work, school, or volunteering to keep their coverage.

There is an exemption built into the rule for family caregivers. Anyone providing significant care to a disabled family member is supposed to be protected from the requirement entirely.

Protected now means monthly documentation.
👉 Proof of exact caregiving hours, submitted on a schedule, verified by a system built to catch fraud, not recognize devotion.

Justice in Aging already has the data on what happens next, because states have run versions of this before. Eligible people lose coverage anyway, buried under the very paperwork meant to save them.

7.3 million family caregivers rely on this coverage right now. ‼️

You can write the most compassionate exemption in the country and still lose the person it was meant to protect, if proving the exemption becomes its own unpaid, uncovered job.

This is the same cascade I've been talking about for years, just attacking from a new direction. Cuts to the direct care workforce push families into the gap.

Now the paperwork meant to protect those families may push them out of coverage too.

You can't legislate care. Apparently you can still legislate someone out of the coverage that lets them give it.

Somewhere on your team, a caregiving employee is about to find that out the hard way.

✔️ It won't show up as a headline. It'll show up as unexplained stress, and later, as a resignation nobody saw coming.

Is your HR team tracking anything that would catch this before it costs you someone good?

PS. After 25 years inside the aging system, from direct care to state-level policy, I can help your HR team understand what your caregiving employees are actually navigating. Want to have that conversation?https://lnkd.in/geeXdX8E

Early in my career, I sat with a woman in her final hours because no one else was coming. No family in the waiting room or calls to return. It was just me, a chair pulled close, and the sound of her breathing slowing down.
I have carried that afternoon for more than 25 years. It taught me the sentence I still say in workshops today: the opposite of care is invisibility.
Somewhere in your company right now, an employee is living the other side of that story. Spending lunch breaks on hold with Medicare. Burning PTO on a parent's cardiology appointments. Watching the person who raised them disappear one Tuesday at a time. And saying nothing at work, because work has no language for it.
Nobody can fix aging. What a workplace can fix is whether the people carrying it are seen while they carry it.
Have you ever learned, long after the fact, that a colleague was dealing with something like this the whole time?
PS. The fastest way to make caregiving visible on a team is to simply ask. The Workplace Caregiver Needs Survey is confidential, takes five minutes, and covers up to 20 employees. Each person gets a personal reflection, and you finally see what your people are carrying.https://www.help-project.com/caregiver-survey-tool

One state just started paying for long-term care!!!
On July 1, Washington became the first state in the country to pay out public long-term care benefits. Workers there can now use up to $36,500 for a home care aide, grab bars, a wheelchair ramp, meals, transportation. The unglamorous things that keep an aging parent safe at home.
Now the part HR leaders in the other 49 states should sit with.
There is no fund where your employees live. For most American families, the long-term care plan is a daughter with a full-time job, a guest room, and no idea what a home care aide costs.
Medicare doesn't cover this. Private long-term care insurance covers almost nobody. So the cost lands quietly on your workforce, in reduced hours, declined promotions, and resignations that never mention a parent.
Washington spent years building infrastructure for a problem the rest of the country still files under family matters. A company doesn't have to wait for legislation to build its own version of readiness.
If one STATE can name this problem and build for it, what's stopping a company?
PS. Washington took years to build its safety net. Finding out what your own team is carrying takes 5minutes. The Workplace Caregiver Needs Survey covers up to 20 employees and gives you a Caregiver Risk Score plus the estimated cost of doing nothing, built from your team's own answers. $127. https://www.help-project.com/caregiver-survey-tool

Your dependent care FSA just got a raise

For the first time since 1986, the dependent care FSA limit went up, from $5,000 to $7,500 starting this year.

Congress ignored that number for forty years, and it finally moved because the cost of caring for kids and aging parents stopped being a quiet family footnote and became a line item nobody could pretend was insignificant anymore.

Here is the part almost no one is telling your employees.

Elder care counts‼️

A parent's home health aide, an adult day program, in-home care - all of it can run through that account pre-tax, right alongside daycare and summer camp.

Plan documents had to be formally amended to even offer the new max, which means somewhere in your company, the plan got updated and the announcement never went out.

Employees are still budgeting against the old number, or they never knew the account touched elder care in the first place.

This is the cheapest fix available to any HR team this year, no new benefit to build, no new budget line, just telling people what they already have.

Has your team actually announced the new limit, and does anyone know it covers a parent's care too?

P.S. Most companies are already paying for benefits that could support caregiving employees right now. They just aren't set up to use them that way. I can help you figure out what you already have.

Let's connect.
https://lnkd.in/geeXdX8E

A friend called me from a parking garage.
She was crying. Her mom had fallen again, and the hospital was already talking about discharge. She had a board meeting the next morning. Her daughter had a tournament that weekend.
She said, "I don't even know what to Google."
This is a system problem, one that nobody warned her was coming, that nobody at work even knows she's navigating, and that she's solving at 11 PM in a parking garage.
She's not unusual.
She's your senior project manager.
Your VP of operations.
Your most reliable person on the team.
I went through the aging system alongside my own family for years before I had the language to name what was happening. “The continuum of care” …what it is, how it works, how it's funded, how families get stuck, isn't taught to anyone.
You figure it out in a crisis, usually at the worst possible moment.
That's the problem I built The Help Project to solve.
Not a hotline or another pamphlet in the benefits portal nobody opens.
A real framework for what to do, how to think about it, and how to use the resources already around you.
The parking garage call is where it starts. The question is whether your employees are making that call alone or not.
PS. If any of this is landing for you, I would genuinely enjoy hearing what you are seeing at your company. DM me or drop it in the comments.

SHRM just named caregiving a top-5 workplace issue.
Not a wellness trend. Not a nice-to-have benefit category. A top-five workplace issue, sitting alongside AI, workforce development, and economic uncertainty.
Here's what's underneath that designation: 53% of employees with caregiving responsibilities have missed work in the last year because of it. Presenteeism: showing up physically while mentally triaging a parent's care plan, accounts for 71% of all caregiver productivity loss. And the average cost to employers per caregiving employee?
$35,000 per year, when you fold in absenteeism, distraction, and turnover risk.
The total national tab is estimated at $522 billion annually.
Your most experienced employees, the ones with 15, 20, 25 years of institutional knowledge, are in the thick of it right now.
Gen X is the sandwich generation in real time, and 86% of caregivers between 40 and 60 are reporting they're emotionally exhausted.
SHRM naming it doesn't create the problem. It just means the data is loud enough that HR can't look away anymore.
The question is what you do before your exit interview tells you what your engagement survey didn't.
What are you seeing from caregivers on your team, and are they even telling you?
PS. Most companies are already paying for benefits that could support caregiving employees right now. They just aren't set up to use them that way. I can help you figure out what you already have. Let's connect. https://calendly.com/jroberts-help-project/15-minute-risk-assessment

My camp director told me to study gerontology.

I was a teenager at camp. The director pulled me aside and said, "You have a gift with older people. You should look into gerontology."

I didn't even know what that word meant.

I went home, looked it up, and something clicked that I couldn't fully explain, like someone had just named the thing I was already doing without realizing it.

That comment changed the entire trajectory of my life.

30 years later I had run a $58 million senior living campus, navigated a Lehman Brothers bond collapse mid-construction, sat with hundreds of families in some of the hardest moments of their lives, written a book about the aging crisis in America, and now I'm trying to change how corporations think about the employees quietly managing all of it.

All because some camp director paid attention.

The people who redirect your life rarely know they did it.

They're just telling you what they see. And if you're lucky, you hear them on the right day.

PS. If fact after this conversation I got my first job at a senior center and haven't left the industry since. I love this work and I am excited to now be using my 25 years of experience to help employees navigate these challenging times with their parents and their kids, and their partners and loved ones. If this is something that would benefit your organization let's talk.