Valuing Care: Evidence from Chile’s “Caring for Those Who Care” Program

In 2024, Chile enacted legislation establishing a National System of Support and Care, marking the country’s first comprehensive effort to formalize care as a social right. The law defines care broadly to include receiving care, providing care, and self-care, while also recognizing caregiving as a vital societal function. As part of this initiative, a pilot program titled “Caring for Those Who Care” was launched to be implemented by nonprofit organizations across the Santiago Metropolitan Region.

Through interviews and focus groups, the SIPA capstone project team conducted a qualitative formative evaluation of “Caring for Those Who Care” through the lens of a nonprofit implementer, Fundación Ronda, to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the pilot program and its implementation. Through this research, the team discovered that the program is highly successful at empowering women socially, emotionally, and financially to become paid care assistants within their communities, which strengthened their social bonds and emotional satisfaction and gave them dignified work opportunities. The team also found that the current scope of the program did not fully support the needs of care assistants related to mental health, day-to-day challenges, and intake operations (including training). Drawing on suggestions from care assistants and supervisors as well as research on similar care programs, the team suggested some changes to program design elements, operations, and human resource structures to address these issues.

The final implication of this study is that “Caring for Those Who Care” is an essential public program that positively transforms the livelihoods of care assistants and fills social and economic gaps within the care economy in Chile.