The Help Project, Phoenix, AZ (2026)

05/11/2026

Mother’s Day is a beautiful day for some. It is a complicated one for me. 🌸

My relationship with my own mother isn't a simple one.

For years, this weekend didn't feel like the soft, sentimental "thank you" the commercials sell.

Being a mom to my two daughters has rewritten what this weekend means to me.

Both things are true at once.

That is the part nobody talks about.

Here is why this matters at work:
Holidays like this one walk into your office Monday morning whether your employees want them to or not.

A comment in a meeting or a reminder email from a florist lands, and suddenly, a team member is sitting at their desk holding a lot more than their inbox.

For employees caring for an aging parent, these complicated relationships don’t stay in the past.

They show up in:
1️⃣ The doctor’s appointment that has to be scheduled.
2️⃣ The legal forms that need a signature.
3️⃣ The gut-wrenching conversation about giving up the car keys.

These employees are excellent at the logistics.
They get the task done.

What doesn’t get "done" is the emotional weight underneath.

The resentment of showing up for someone who wasn't there for you.

The grief for a relationship that never was.

The anger at being the "only one" left to do it.

That weight walks into your meetings.

Pro tip for HR leaders:
You likely already pay for an EAP with mental health services. Most employees don't realize it applies to "caregiving stress."

Don't send a generic wellness email this week.

Send a specific one.
Instead of "Reach out if you're stressed," try:
"Mother's Day can be joyful, but it can also be a reminder of loss or a complicated family history. If you are navigating the emotional strain of caring for a parent, our EAP provides 5 free counseling sessions to help you manage that weight."

When you name the hard stuff out loud, you build a culture where that employee stays through the hard year because they finally felt seen.

You trade "quiet quitting" for deep, institutional loyalty. 🤝

The employees who need that reminder won't raise their hand. They will quietly screenshot your email and use it later.

HR leaders: Have you noticed a "holiday hangover" in your team's energy this week, or are these caregiving struggles still largely invisible in your workplace?

Happy Mother’s Day to the moms with easy stories and the moms with hard ones. Both of you are doing the work.

PS. Caregiving strain is one of the leading drivers of mid-career turnover that nobody tracks.

If you want to see what this is actually costing your organization, get my Turnover Cost Tool for caregiving employees. 📊: https://lnkd.in/geuhdadB

05/07/2026

Let me tell you who is quietly pulling back at your company right now.

She's 48, maybe 52. She's been with you long enough to know where every body is buried and how every system actually works.
She trains the new people without being asked.
She covers when someone's out.
She doesn't complain.
She just handles it.
She's also managing her mother's medication schedule, coordinating with a sibling who isn't doing their fair share, and trying to figure out if her dad's house needs to be sold before or after he qualifies for Medicaid.
She hasn't mentioned any of it to HR. She never will.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gen X women ages 45–64 are carrying the heaviest eldercare burden in the country. 7.6 million of them are simultaneously raising children under 18.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau found that women lose approximately 15% of their lifetime earnings to unpaid caregiving — and that's not just lost income in the moment. That's reduced Social Security contributions, smaller retirement savings, and a compounding financial gap that follows them for decades into a retirement they were already behind on.

AARP research puts 69% of Gen X workers in that category — already feeling behind before the caregiving math hit.

She is subsidizing the American care system with her career. And she's doing it invisibly.

Here's what HR leaders need to understand:
this is not a diversity issue.
It's not a compassion issue.
It is a business continuity issue.
The women most likely to leave your organization — or quietly downshift until they're a fraction of who they were — are the ones carrying institutional knowledge that took a decade to build.
They are your operational backbone. The ones who remember why the policy exists, who know which client needs which kind of handling, who keep things from falling apart when leadership is looking the other way.

When they leave, you don't just lose a headcount. You lose the architecture.
And they are leaving, or pulling back, or turning down the promotion they've earned — not because they don't want it, but because they have done the math and there is no version of "more" that fits right now.
Replacing them will cost you 50–200% of their annual salary according to SHRM. The knowledge they take with them can't be priced.
So here's the question I'd ask any HR leader reading this: what is your company actually doing to retain mid-career women who are managing care responsibilities they've never mentioned to you?

Not what's in your benefits guide. What are you actually doing?
Because if your answer relies on employees raising their hand first — you've already missed most of them.
👉 Find out what caregiver-driven turnover is already costing your organization: DM for the link

05/06/2026

What happens when employees decide silence is safer than honesty.
SHRM found that 42% of working caregivers report significant career challenges from their caregiving responsibilities. That's nearly half of your caregiving workforce experiencing real, measurable career damage from something they're carrying outside the building.
Separately, the 2026 NAMI-Ipsos workplace mental health poll found that 41% of employees who don't discuss personal challenges at work say stigma is the reason. 33% don't want to seem weak. 23% fear retaliation.
Put those 2 data points next to each other and the picture gets uncomfortable fast.
Nearly half of your caregiving employees are experiencing career fallout. And nearly half of all employees struggling with something personal have already decided that silence is the smarter choice. Not because the door isn't technically open. Because they've done the math on what happens when they walk through it.
That's not a communication problem. It's a trust problem. And trust problems don't show up in exit interviews. They show up as disengagement metrics no one can explain, performance reviews that miss the point entirely, and eventually, a resignation letter from someone you didn't see coming.
When I run a workshop inside a company, one of the most consistent things I watch happen is this: employees realize they're not alone. Not in a group-therapy way. In a "wait, this is everyone" way. And managers realize that what they've been reading as low effort or checked out is actually someone carrying a crisis they didn't feel safe naming. 1 manager told me after a 90-minute session that she immediately thought of 3 people on her team she needed to follow up with differently. Not because the workshop gave her a script. Because it gave her a frame.
The workshop doesn't fix caregiving. Nothing fixes caregiving. But it does something that turns out to be the prerequisite for everything else: it makes the problem visible.
Visible is where solutions start.
If your employees don't feel safe telling you what they're carrying, you're not managing people. You're managing the performance of people trying very hard not to let you see what's actually happening. That's expensive, and it's fixable. But only if you're willing to create the conditions where honesty feels like less of a risk than silence.
That's what process transparency actually looks like in practice. Not a hotline. Not a benefits PDF. A room where people realize they're allowed to be human at work, and leaders realize they've been responding to symptoms instead of causes.

P.S. A 90-minute workshop changed how an entire management team responded to their people. If you want to know what that looked like inside 1 company, I'm happy to share it. Grab your Turnover Calculator Here: https://www.help-project.com/calculator-e2102230-4386-4017-b1b1-1a93a71ec6e5

04/30/2026

When I sit down with a company to assess eldercare risk in their workforce, I'm not asking them to tell me anything they don't already know.
I'm asking them to look at what they already have — through a completely different lens.
Here's what that actually looks like.
The first thing I pull is workforce demographics by age bracket. If your workforce skews Gen X — employees between 45 and 65 — your exposure is high. Not might be high. Is high. That generation is statistically carrying the heaviest eldercare burden in the country right now, and the peak hasn't passed. If a significant portion of your institutional knowledge lives in that age cohort, you have a caregiving risk profile whether you've named it or not.
The second thing I look at is benefit utilization — specifically the gap between what employees have access to and what they're actually using. Low EAP engagement paired with climbing PTO requests and FMLA applications is not a coincidence. That pattern has a name. It just hasn't been given one yet inside most HR departments. Something is driving those employees to take leave instead of asking for support, and in my experience, that something is almost always a care situation they don't know how to surface at work.
Then I go to exit interview data. I'm looking for two phrases in particular: "personal reasons" and "family obligations." Those are the two most common euphemisms for a caregiving crisis HR never named. When they show up repeatedly in a 12-month window — especially from tenured employees in the same age bracket — that's not a coincidence either. That's a pattern with a cost attached to it.
Finally, I look at behavioral shifts inside the organization. Who turned down a promotion in the last two years without a clear explanation? Who moved from full-time to part-time after a decade of full-time status? Who had perfect attendance for years and suddenly started taking sick days in clusters? None of those data points mean caregiving in isolation. But together, in context, they tell a story that most HR teams have been reading as separate, unrelated events.
None of this requires a new budget line. It requires looking at data you already have and asking a question you haven't thought to ask yet.
That's what 20 years inside the aging system trained me to see. Not just what the numbers say — but what they're trying to tell you when nobody has given the problem a name.
So here's the question worth sitting with: what is your workforce data already telling you — and would you recognize it if you knew what to look for?
👉 Start with the Hidden Turnover Calculator to see what caregiving-related attrition may already be costing your organization: DM for the Link

04/29/2026

Let me tell you who is quietly pulling back at your company right now.
She's 48, maybe 52. She's been with you long enough to know where every body is buried and how every system actually works. She trains the new people without being asked. She covers when someone's out. She doesn't complain. She just handles it.

She's also managing her mother's medication schedule, coordinating with a sibling who isn't doing their fair share, and trying to figure out if her dad's house needs to be sold before or after he qualifies for Medicaid. She hasn't mentioned any of it to HR. She never will.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gen X women ages 45–64 are carrying the heaviest eldercare burden in the country. 7.6 million of them are simultaneously raising children under 18. The Department of Labor's Women's Bureau found that women lose approximately 15% of their lifetime earnings to unpaid caregiving — and that's not just lost income in the moment. That's reduced Social Security contributions, smaller retirement savings, and a compounding financial gap that follows them for decades into a retirement they were already behind on. AARP research puts 69% of Gen X workers in that category — already feeling behind before the caregiving math hit.

She is subsidizing the American care system with her career. And she's doing it invisibly.

Here's what HR leaders need to understand: this is not a diversity issue. It's not a compassion issue. It is a business continuity issue. The women most likely to leave your organization — or quietly downshift until they're a fraction of who they were — are the ones carrying institutional knowledge that took a decade to build. They are your operational backbone. The ones who remember why the policy exists, who know which client needs which kind of handling, who keep things from falling apart when leadership is looking the other way.

When they leave, you don't just lose a headcount. You lose the architecture.

And they are leaving, or pulling back, or turning down the promotion they've earned — not because they don't want it, but because they have done the math and there is no version of "more" that fits right now.
Replacing them will cost you 50–200% of their annual salary according to SHRM. The knowledge they take with them can't be priced.
So here's the question I'd ask any HR leader reading this: what is your company actually doing to retain mid-career women who are managing care responsibilities they've never mentioned to you?
Not what's in your benefits guide. What are you actually doing?
Because if your answer relies on employees raising their hand first — you've already missed most of them.

👉 Find out what caregiver-driven turnover is already costing your organization: DM me for your link to the calculator

04/28/2026

98% of mid-to-large companies offer an EAP.
Only 4% of employees use one in any given year.
Let that math sit for a second.
According to Mental Health America and decades of EAP utilization research from SHRM, the gap between availability and activation is one of the most expensive non-problems in workforce management. Your company is almost certainly paying for a benefit that a fraction of your people ever touch — and in most cases, nobody's told them what it actually covers.
Here's where it gets specific.
The daughter who is up at midnight trying to figure out whether her mother qualifies for Medicaid? Her company's EAP almost certainly includes a free legal consultation that could answer that question in one phone call. She doesn't know that. She's Googling instead. She's panicking instead. She's showing up to work tomorrow exhausted and distracted instead.
The son managing his father's finances from a second browser tab during his lunch break? There's a financial planning benefit sitting unused in his benefits package. He's never heard it described that way, so it never occurred to him to use it.
Most EAPs include legal consultations, financial planning sessions, mental health counseling, and caregiver-specific resources — all things that could directly support an employee navigating a parent's care crisis. But the dots haven't been connected for them. "EAP" sounds like a hotline for people in acute crisis, not a toolkit for the slow-motion collision between work and eldercare that millions of your employees are managing right now.
Companies don't need to add new benefits. They need to activate the ones they're already paying for. That is one of the fastest, lowest-cost interventions an HR team can make — and it starts with reframing what employees already have access to.
Do your employees know what their EAP actually covers for an eldercare situation? Not in theory. Not according to the benefits guide nobody reads. Actually know?
If the answer is anything other than a confident yes — that's the gap worth closing.
👉 Curious how much caregiver-driven turnover is already costing your organization? Use our Hidden Turnover Calculator to find out: DM me for the link

04/27/2026

455,000 women left the U.S. workforce between January and August of 2025.
The Catalyst 2026 report just gave us the number. 42% of them said caregiving was the reason.
I need you to sit with that for a second — because I know what your brain just did. It filed it under "personal issue." Maybe even "sad, but what can we do." And that's exactly the problem.
These weren't entry-level employees. They were mid-career. Experienced. The kind of people your organization spent years developing and whose institutional knowledge you simply cannot replace through a job posting. And they didn't leave because they stopped wanting to work. They left because your environment made staying impossible.
Women working without flexible scheduling were nearly twice as likely to walk. Not a little more likely. Nearly twice.
So let's have the real conversation: this is not a wellness issue. This is not a diversity initiative. This is not a benefit brochure problem. This is a workforce planning failure — and it's expensive. The cost to replace a mid-career employee runs between 50 and 200% of their annual salary. Multiply that across even a handful of women who left for reasons you never tracked, and you're looking at a serious hole in your retention budget that nobody named.
Here's the question I'd ask every HR leader reading this: does your exit interview process even ask about caregiving responsibilities?
Because if you don't ask, you don't know. And if you don't know, you can't fix it. And while you're figuring it out, the next person quietly managing a parent's medication schedule on their lunch break is already updating their resume.
Caregiving is now the number one reason experienced women are leaving jobs they otherwise would have kept. That's not a personal story. That's a workforce strategy problem — and it has your name on it.
P.S. Most companies are already paying for benefits — EAP, legal, wellness — that could be activated for this exact issue. You may not have a resource problem. You may have a connection problem.
P.P.S. If you want to see what this is actually costing you, I built a turnover calculator specifically for this. Run your numbers. The total is usually the thing that moves people from "we should probably do something" to "we need to do something now." DM me for the link

04/17/2026

Your caregiving employees don't know they're caregiving

Someone left a comment on one of my posts recently that stopped me cold. She said caregiving is like the boiling frog. You don't notice it happening to you. Most of the time it just feels like you're helping out mom or keeping an eye on things.

She's right. And that is exactly why HR can't find this problem.

Nobody wakes up one morning and says "I am now a caregiver." It starts with a phone call. Then a doctor's appointment you offered to drive to. Then a weekend spent sorting through medications because something didn't seem right. Then you're managing a parent's finances on your lunch break and you still haven't told a single person at work.

By the time an employee would even think to use the word caregiver, they've already missed deadlines, turned down a promotion, or started quietly planning their exit.

63 million Americans are providing care for an adult family member right now. Only about half have told their employer. And the ones who haven't aren't being secretive. They just don't have language for what's happening to them yet.

This is why wellness benefits and EAP programs don't touch it. You can't access a resource for a problem you haven't named.

The companies that figure this out first will keep their most experienced people. The ones that wait will keep losing them and never understand why.

What would change at your company if your employees actually had the language for what they're carrying?

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.

04/15/2026

A friend called me in crisis

Her mom had just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Two and a half weeks from diagnosis to death. Her dad was clearly in the later stages of dementia, and both parents were still living at home independently. Nobody in the family had ever had the conversation about what happens when things fall apart.

So I flew to Maine.

Their mom had been the person holding everything together. Managing the house, managing their dad, managing every decision that kept their lives running. When she got that diagnosis, the whole foundation shifted overnight. The family had the financial resources to handle it. That was never the issue. The issue was that they were emotionally paralyzed and had no framework for what to do next.

In two weeks, I helped them get their dad assessed and moved into a memory care community. I took that completely off their plate so my friend could be with her mom while she was dying. We sorted through who would manage the finances, who would oversee the care, who would handle the house, who would help their dad understand why his world was changing.

After it was over, my friend told me she would have paid $50,000 for what I did.

I did it because she is my friend. But that conversation changed something. It made me realize how many families are sitting in that exact same crisis with no one to call. And how many of those families have someone at your company who just stopped showing up the way they used to.

That is why The Help Project exists.

PS. If your HR team has noticed senior employees quietly pulling back but can't pinpoint why, elder caregiving is likely part of the picture. DM me and let's talk about what that might look like at your company.

04/15/2026

SHRM just named caregiving a top workplace issue

A year ago, if you said eldercare belonged in the same conversation as AI strategy and workforce development, most HR leaders would have politely changed the subject.

That conversation is shifting.

SHRM put caregiving on its Top 5 Workplace Issues list for 2026. Harvard Business Review ran a feature last summer titled "Your Company Needs an Eldercare Policy," spotlighting Bank of America, AbbVie, and Microsoft as early movers. The data behind it is hard to ignore. Working caregivers miss an average of 1.2 workdays per month, costing an estimated $17.5 billion in lost wages nationally. 42% say caregiving has directly impacted their career growth.

The organizations paying attention right now are the ones that will retain their most experienced talent through the next decade. The ones that aren't will keep watching senior employees quietly pull back and wonder what happened.

I have spent 25 years inside the aging system, from direct care to state-level policy. What I can tell you is that the companies getting ahead of this aren't starting from scratch. They're connecting what they already offer to a problem they haven't named yet.

That is exactly what The Help Project was built to do.

Is your HR team tracking where eldercare is already showing up in your workforce?

PS. I have been a certified dementia trainer for years and have seen what happens when managers recognize the signs early versus when they don't. If you want to talk about what that training looks like for your leadership team, DM me.

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