How to Empower the Caregivers of Veterans

With Veteran’s Day this week, one of the best ways to support veterans is to empower their caregivers, argues Steve Schwab, CEO of the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, a research and advocacy organization focused on military and veteran families.

Schwab points out that there are 14.5 million Americans who care for a loved one with long-term health needs due to injuries or illnesses sustained during their military service, and 82% of those caregivers are the sole breadwinners in their households.

In addition to providing the robust flexibility policies, caregiving benefits, and caregiving employee resource groups (ERGs) that we’ve previously covered in Charter Pro, Schwab points to a few tactics employers can use that are particularly impactful for military and veteran caregivers:

• Provide fully covered, flexible back-up care for adult dependents. For military and veteran caregivers, finding back-up care can be a challenge even with workplace stipends because many programs require families to hire professionally trained and certified careworkers to receive reimbursement. “What the best programs provide… is training where you can train a loved one who’s much easier to ask to come in and care for your loved one while you’re working or away… and they can be paid through your benefits,” Schwab says.
• Create peer-mentoring relationships with other veteran caregivers. “It is life changing for a caregiver who never really saw themselves as such to be linked with someone like them, let alone be in an environment where there are thousands of others that they can learn from every single day,” Schwab says. These peer-mentoring relationships could take place within a company’s internal caregiving ERG, or companies can provide external connections to organizations like the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, which organizes peer-mentoring groups to gather military and veteran caregivers from across the country.

By Michelle Peng

Originally published in Charter Works