Christina Keys 10/8/24

(This interview has been edited and condensed for length)

Zack & Selma: Tell us a little about yourself.

Christina: I was a career woman, and I worked really hard for 20 years to build myself up in the tech industry. And in 2013, my mother had a stroke, and I became a family caregiver. I stayed at my job until 2017, and then I had to leave because working 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, business to business was not conducive to caregiving…. I wound up having to take 5 part time jobs…. One of the part time jobs I got was working in the retirement and senior industry…. My job was to build referral partner relationships…. Then I created a…hyperlocal nonprofit that was really a collective of resources… and then I started advocating, for family caregivers, and speaking nationally. One thing led to another and Caregiving.com picked me up to duplicate the model of my nonprofit across the United States.

…I was doing a lot of advocacy work, with people like Caring Across Generations…I was doing a lot of speaking…and my care journey for my mother lasted ten years. And then…my partner…had a stroke. And I became his caregiver. Then 2022, my dad died…then my mother passed away. And I thought my caregiving journey was over, but little did I realize the caregiver recovery piece just started…. So, now I go all over the United States and speak…on family caregiving, on caregiver recovery, on how broken our health care system is, how employers need to work better with their employees that are caregiving…. I help businesses who work with family caregivers to really make a bigger impact with those family caregivers and what they're doing with them. Because I feel like a lot of people know how to work with disabled folks and seniors. They know how to market to them, but we're so invisible as family caregivers. They really don't know how to reach us. They really don't know how to talk to us.

Selma: You were talking about your mom having a stroke and you left your job. Before leaving did you speak with your employer about your caregiving status? If not, why not?

Christina: So, I kept it a secret because I worked in the tech industry.… I was managing 192 tech accounts. It was very competitive, and it was a very good job. And I didn't want them to know that anything was interfering… They didn't know…. I didn't want anybody to know that I couldn't do what they were doing. I didn't want anybody to have any excuse to take any of my accounts because that was my livelihood. Everything equated to care for my mother.

Zack: Would you tell yourself anything different now with all that you know? What kind of advice would you give Christina back then before you left the organization or while you were keeping this a secret?

Christina: Well, first of all, things are really different now than 2017. I think the pandemic really changed a lot of things for people and really brought caregiving to light. And now there's so many amazing programs for employers to have in their HR stack for family caregivers. There wasn't back then…. So, if I were a caregiver starting today, I would say check with your HR department and see what they have available in their HR stack.

Selma: What do you see as one or two major challenges for employers to help employees who are in the situation that you were in, or to help prepare their employees for caregiving in the future?

Christina: Well, I think that a lot of employers are starting to, like I said, add to their HR stack something for family caregivers. What I've seen and what I've heard from people who are working at large companies, is that it's great and they get the information during orientation, but not everybody's a caregiver when they start with that company…. Why are they not having somebody come in and do lunch and learns? Why are they not having in their newsletter saying, here's your caregiver you know, if you're a family caregiver because we know what it is. 17 to 23% of any company's employee base are family caregivers. And if you add in, that people who are taking care of children too, you're up to 40%. So why are they not continually, you know, educating them that they have those programs?

So that's one of the challenges I've seen is people don't know, and so they're still keeping it a secret…. Because they don't want to get fired, and the workplace is so competitive these days…. And so they don’t want to lose that job… if they're making good money because that livelihood is going to pay for the care for the person they're caring for.

Zack: Can we talk a little bit more about keeping it a secret? I have read, mostly on LinkedIn, both sides of the argument. One side says, you need to self-identify as a caregiver so that you can get the support and help that you need. And then I've seen the other side that says, that's wrong. You should never force employees to self-identify with anything, and that's not the main issue why people keep it secret. Where are you with this? What advice would you give to somebody who right now is reading this and is keeping it a secret?

Christina: Well, again, I think there are so many more programs these days, and there's so many more people that are open to that. It's just like in your EAP program. They have stuff for counseling. They have stuff for grief. They have all kinds of things now. I would say you don't necessarily have to keep it a secret, but I feel like it depends on the company. Have they adopted something in their HR stack? Honestly, if I worked for a tech company today, like a large tech company, and they hadn't adopted something in their HR stack… there's no way I'm bringing it up…. But, I would say you need to speak up… at least to your peers because what I can tell you is whether you're speaking up to management or not, for whatever reason, if they don't have something in their care stack, if you're speaking up to your coworkers, remember, 17 to 23 percent of those coworkers, you'll be surprised that the person in the cubicle that you're sitting next to might be a family caregiver also. And if it's not the one right next to you, it's the one three cubicles down.

Selma: So given your story, can you talk a little bit about how you feel about self-care?

Christina: Well, two things about self-care that I'm going to say right off the bat. The best way to learn about self-care as a family caregiver is from a family caregiver. Because here's the deal, Selma, you know that if Sally Sue, who's never been a family caregiver before, she says to you, put your mask on first, she's just going to stop there. A family caregiver's going to say, put your oxygen mask on first. Here's how to do it. Here's where to get it. Here's how to use it. Here's how often you use it…We're going to because we know…. So, that support from a family caregiver, that peer to peer support is really a great form of self-care.

But one of the biggest things about self-care that I had to do because remember, I had to save my life. Everybody kept talking about self-care. I was sleeping 5 to 10 hours a week. In 3 years, I gained a 100 pounds. My body was literally shutting down. I went from playing on 3 softball teams, vacationing, working full time, doing all this stuff, being super healthy to in just 3 years, being told I had 6 months to live, you know, from the stress of caregiving. And everybody mentioned self-care during that time. I was like, “You don't understand.” So, I had to make a choice. The first thing I had to do was redefine my normal of what self-care was. Because when they said self-care, all I could think was the self-care I was doing before when I had money, when I had time. And at this point, you know, that was mani pedis, massages, vacations. So, my first act of self-care, after I redefined self-care, redefined what normal was so I could stop shaming myself, was taking a blood pressure pill and texting my friend that I took it for 30 days. I had to break down self-care into thirty-second acts, one-minute acts, five-minute acts, and those added up. And what I found after a while during that journey was, I actually had time all along.

Selma: Did you sometimes just feel guilty doing things for yourself? Did you have that issue?

Christina: Oh my God, yeah! Well, I remember I used to go to Hawaii every single year before caregiving. I had money to do that. Well, we hadn't used our time share in forever. And finally, a few years in, I was going to go…. I went and I got the perfect caregiver for mom… and it took me three days to even calm down. I remember I kept calling my mom and the caregiver because I felt guilty, I felt nervous, and they were like, “Stop calling us. We're okay.”

Zack: Do you have any tips for interviewers, managers when looking at gaps in resumes so that they don't overlook some great talent and have bias? Or what about a candidate? What can caregivers do to beef up their resume because I have also read how caregivers are afraid to put down gaps in their resume because they think it's going to be negative.

Christina: Well, first of all, if you looked at my resume today on LinkedIn, you'd see that I proudly display “family caregiver.” Because the skills I learned as a family caregiver let me tell you. My research skills, better than any job I was at. My multitasking skills, my crisis management skills, my time management skills, all of those.

And I've worked for companies where I've had three computer screens going at one time … I've worked at high demand jobs and nothing prepared me for the things I had to do as a family caregiver. When you're driving down the road and your paralyzed mother's in the car and she starts choking and you gotta figure out how to do the Heimlich at 60 miles an hour and pull over safely and call 911. I think I can handle anything your job throws at me. So, yeah, I would put down, because not only as a family caregiver, are you doing med management, case management, you're managing the caregivers that are there. So, you're a leader there too. You're a manager there too…. But you're also doing it in a high stress situation. Why would you not want to put that down?

…Something in life has happened, and whatever that is in life that they've had to take time off or whether it be giving birth to a child, taking care of a loved one, I'm pretty sure they gained some skills. They're going to make an even better candidate than they could possibly be. Because they've gone through things that have been highly emotional, highly stressful. They had to learn things without being… taught anything. They had to learn on the go. I mean, these are probably going to be some of your best candidates because they've been thrown into the fire. They figured it out, and they came out like a champion. Now they're sitting in front of you saying, I'm ready to work.

Selma: What can employers do to train their recruiters and their managers and those people that are the face of the company, to be more receptive to those resume gaps? To be more embracing of working caregivers because that’s talent that walks out the door to another company that is more empathic.

Christina: Well, first of all, I understand they're running a business, and they have to run a business. But if they're looking to do the best for the business, they want to look for the best candidate. So, they want to look at those transferable skills, and there are many, many skills that a family caregiver brings to the table. Again, we've got time management skills, we've got research skills, we've got crisis management skills, we've got multitasking skills. We've got all of these things that most jobs are going to demand.

We've got somebody who's going to be able to learn quickly as they go. We've got somebody who's going to be able to find the resources to make it happen. Somebody who is dedicated to doing well at whatever job is put in front of them. They are dedicated to the core…. You want somebody who's loyal. You get a caregiver. They are going to be at that job. They are not looking for a job. They are making a conscious choice to choose you because it has to fit in their lifestyle, and they've gone through enough hell that you're a choice they're consciously making.

So don't pass them. Don't pass them up. Let's be honest. It's a business. They can't just, like, feel compassion for everybody. Let's look at the facts. We want to look at the facts on that resume. If there's an open gap, remember that open gap is because something happened that built life skills that they cannot train at their place, but they will be useful at that place.

How managers can do that is they bring in a consultant like you, Zack, or you, Selma, or me, where we come in and we talk to these managers, and it's not just when they get that addition to their HR stack, but they're having quarterly meetings because life happens for those managers too…. So, they need to have people coming in quarterly and not only talking to their management team but talking to the 17 to 23% of the family caregivers who are at their job on how to have work life balance…. They can buy all the great programs they want. But if they are not following through and having quarterly information go out, having quarterly people come in and do meetings, whether it be virtually or not, they are failing and they're wasting their money.