Joint PSO Collaboration on the Care Economy

Care economy landscape analysis project logos

Care Economy Narrative Change Landscape Analysis

With support from the Care for All with Respect and Equity (CARE) Fund, a group of six philanthropy support organizations (PSOs) – Asset Funders Network, Economic Opportunity Funders, Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, Grantmakers In Aging, Grantmakers In Health, and Disability & Philanthropy Forum – have agreed to collaborate to develop a national landscape analysis of narrative change and strategic communications efforts across the care economy, including child care and early learning, paid family and medical leave, and long- term services and supports for older adults and people with disabilities, with a focus on users of care, paid care workers, and unpaid family and friend caregivers.

The PSO collaborative has hired consultants Padmini Parthasarathy, Sāmya Strategies, and Julie Kashen, Kashen Consulting to conduct this analysis. Final products are expected to be completed in late 2023 and may include a searchable table of projects and publications, short summary of findings with data visualizations, and a national webinar to share the project findings.

Funder Survey

Please help us identify narrative change efforts across the care economy by completing our survey.

In this survey, we will ask you about your own grantmaking (if you have any), other funders working in this space, and narrative change projects that you are aware of. Your response will be used to help inform a searchable table of projects and publications and short summary of findings. The data you provide in this survey will not be publicly shared without permission.

Responses are due no later than February 24, 2023.

View a pdf of the survey questions here.

Take the Survey

Background

Why Care About Care? Our Economy Depends On It

In June 2021, Asset Funders Network (AFN) and Economic Opportunity Funders (EOF) worked together to release a brief, webinar, and video to deepen funders’ understanding of the intersectional and intergenerational issues related to the care economy and building a robust care infrastructure – a publicly funded system that recognizes care as both an individual and social responsibility, values care workers, and supports family members to both care and provide financially for each other.

The project highlighted key policies and programs that address the economic inequities arising from these issues and proposed a diverse set of impactful investment strategies, including progressive policy and programmatic solutions.

To build on this effort, with input from members and field partners, AFN, EOF, Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, Grantmakers In Aging, Grantmakers In Health (GIH), and Disability & Philanthropy Forum have agreed to collaborate to develop a national landscape analysis of narrative change efforts across the care economy.

Project Framework

Narrative change is an emerging field, with funders and practitioners actively shaping the field as they go. As such, we think the most effective approach to determining a guiding framework for the project at hand is to build on the latest research on narrative change in the philanthropic and nonprofit sector. To determine the scope for this project, we leveraged existing best practices, research, and resources from Convergence Partnership and Pop Culture Collaborative.

For the purposes of this project, we define narrative change efforts as those that:

Have a long-term timeline
Focus on creating a new environment that supports making ambitious changes
Are led by every day narrators, long-term strategists, and organizers
Elevate, establish, and share new values
Help shape storytelling across all social change strategies, including building on strategic communications efforts tied to specific care policies
Shift narratives in the three segments of the narrative power building ecosystem: mass media, mass culture and mass movements

We will also examine strategic communications efforts that support longer term narrative change. For the purposes of this project, we define strategic communications efforts as those that:

Have a short-term timeline of six months to three years
Connect to public policy fights
Are led by communications experts, content creators, and message researchers
Ground their work in currently shared values
Embody one social change strategy among several others

View a detailed overview of our project framework here.