John,

We believe stories have the power to transform the way that care is valued in our culture – and we’re so proud of this latest project (like we’re proud of the Care Fellowship that you’ve heard a lot about over the last week).

Recently we sat down with some of the cast from NBC’s This Is Us, Seth Rogen, Lauren Miller-Rogen from Hilarity for Charity, and our Executive Director Ai-jen Poo to talk about how the show represented family caregiving on TV and taught us how to have tough but important conversations for adapting to illness and end-of-life care.

We dug into the show’s portrayal of care and the waves it made across the country in giving much needed visibility to the highs and lows of family caregiving.

Watch the full backyard chat with Mandy Moore and the rest of the This Is Us cast here.

Our conversation with the This Is Us cast highlighted how powerful it was to see a care recipient (Mandy Moore’s character Rebecca Pearson) hold agency over the plan for her end-of-life care, how essential respect and support is for primary caregivers (like Jon Huertas’ character Miguel Rivas), and how sandwich generation caregivers (like Chrissy Metz’s character Kate Pearson) balance their daily and family life.

Our This Is Us backyard chat is just one part of our dedicated work to bring more care stories to TV and film. We’re currently working with screenwriters, actors, and other content creators to include more caregiving storylines in their work to help move society from thinking about care as an individual responsibility to an urgent social issue that requires collective solutions.

A well-told story extends far beyond the run time of a weekly episode or good movie. Authentic stories can change our cultures, communities, and the world.

Watch the This Is Us Backyard conversation about care here.

Caregiving is not openly talked about. It’s invisible in our culture because caregiving has historically been a role low-income Black and Brown women are hired for and because it’s considered as the “women’s work” in the home.

Because of this, many people who give and receive care often feel isolated, powerless, and alone. The lack of visibility around care – combined with the American “bootstraps” mentality – has led directly to a lack of societal and governmental support for families and communities who give and receive care support.

This is Us: The Final Chapter was one of the first mainstream TV shows to put a family’s caregiving journey front and center. Now, we at Caring Across want to make sure it isn’t the last.

With your help, Caring Across Generations can make care more visible in our culture and help shift how society prioritizes care in our daily lives. You can support that work right now with a gift.

With your support, we can continue to uplift the stories and experiences of caregivers, care recipients, and families across the country.

Your donation will support our work connecting with folks in diverse cultural spaces about the stories we need to see on screen and how to make change happen. As the lead for our work behind-the-scenes in Hollywood, I’m having daily conversations with television writers, showrunners, producers, and executives about how they can make care more visible in the stories they’re creating.

Your generosity helps make this dedicated outreach to film and TV content generators possible to ensure more film and TV include stories about care and the joy of caregiving.

Thank you for your support!

With care,

Lydia Storie
Senior Manager, Culture Change
Caring Across Generations