Former Alzheimer's caregiver · Advocate · Speaker

I help institutions see — and keep — the caregivers they're quietly losing.

For ten years, I was the caregiver no one could see. Full-time care for my grandmother through Alzheimer's — a decade The Guardian documented and The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on. Now I bring that lens to campuses and workplaces.

Andrew Rahal and his grandmother Elo
Andrew and his grandmother, Elo.
"It's a job, and a tough one." — The Guardian Featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education 10 years full-time dementia care TED Fellows & Gates Ventures documentary series
What audiences take away

Caregiving isn't a private family problem. It's an institutional one.

Every room I speak to contains people carrying this in silence. On a campus, they're the students statistically twice as likely to disappear before graduation. In a workforce, they're the employees costing an estimated $35,000 a year each in invisible lost productivity.

Audiences leave with three things: the ability to see the caregivers around them, the language to talk about invisible care work, and concrete practices to keep the people carrying it.

Elo dancing at a family wedding
"Just because they have Alzheimer's and dementia, people forget they are sentient human beings. They still feel." — Andrew, in The Guardian
The numbers

The leak no one can see on any budget line.

1 in 6
employees is a family caregiver right now
the dropout rate among caregiver students
3–5×
return on every $1 invested in caregiver support
Start a conversation