Programs
Building Caregiver Heath & Wellness
NAC’s Health and Wellness Initiatives drive system-level change for families navigating complex and serious illnesses. Through research, advocacy, and strategic partnerships, we improve caregiver health, emotional well-being, and financial stability. These efforts strengthen the caregiving ecosystem and ensure families are supported throughout the care journey.
Initiatives
Complex Care Collaboratives catalyze cross-sector partnerships to enhance recognition and support for family caregivers in complex care delivery.
Caregiver Voice initiatives systematically translate lived experiences of family caregivers into practice and policy change.
Complex Care Collaboratives
The Complex Care Collaboratives bring together caregivers, clinicians, researchers, and patient advocacy groups to improve support for families facing complex medical conditions within the health care system. These collaboratives create peer learning events, resource sharing, and advocacy opportunities. Each Collaborative identifies gaps in practice, develops caregiver driven insights, translates findings into actionable recommendations that can be applied across care settings. These efforts help move the field toward more consistent and equitable support for caregivers nationwide.
Cancer Caregiving Collaborative
The Cancer Caregiving Collaborative focuses on improving the caregiver experience throughout cancer care. It strengthens how caregivers are integrated into healthcare systems by promoting effective training, psychosocial support, and connections to resources inside and outside clinical settings.
The Collaborative also advances financial well-being by supporting direct financial aid efforts and policies that improve long-term economic stability for caregiving families. Through research, story-sharing, research, and cross-sector alignment, The Collaborative brings forward solutions grounded in what caregivers say they need most.
Transplant Caregiving Collaborative
The Transplant Caregiving Collaborative works to better understand and improve the experience of caregivers in both solid and non-solid organ transplant care, one of the few areas in medicine where a caregiver is required for treatment of eligibility.
The Collaborative’s examines how transplant centers idenitfy, train, and support caregivers, and address the gaps revealed through national research. Its work guides policy and practice change that helps shade light on the importance of transplant teams to integrate caregivers more, provide culturally appropriate education, and build systems that strengthen both patient and family outcomes.
Caregiver Voice
Caregiver Voices is a platform for elevating lived experiences of caregivers through storytelling, research, and narrative change. This initiative brings real caregiver perspectives into national conversations about healthcare, policy, and research. By centering voices often not included in decision making, Caregiver Voices initiatives, ensures that policies and programs reflect the realities of caregiving in the U.S.
Portraits of Caregiving
Portraits of Caregiving amplifies the real-life experiences of family caregivers, including from diverse social, cultural, and economic backgrounds. These stories not only highlight individual journeys but also paint a powerful picture of the shared challenges caregivers face, including a lack of adequate infrastructure, health and economic inequities, and limited access to support services. NAC translates the lived experience of family caregivers to inform its programmatic, policy, and research initiatives and shift systems in support for caregivers.
Caregiver-Inclusive Value Initiative
The Caregiver-Inclusive Value Initiative explores how caregiver well-being impacts the entire care ecosystem, from patient outcomes and care quality to workforce stability and healthcare costs. By identifying the spillover effects of caregiving, this initiative makes the case for why caregivers must be included in care models, value-based payment structures, and system level planning. It provides evidence-based assessment to help decision makers meaningfully integrate family caregivers into healthcare systems.
Resources
Caregiver Resources
NAC offers a range of resources to directly support family caregivers and those who work to empower them. The Circle of Care Guidebook series and Take Care Community website provide practical tools and information for navigating the caregiving journey.
Insights & Reports
NAC reports offer valuable data and insights on the needs of caregivers across the lifespan. These reports can be condition-specific, address the experiences of caregiver populations, or analyze the economic impact of caregiving.
Our Innovation Reports highlight social intervention programs designed to address workplace, healthcare system, and product development challenges faced by caregivers.
Our Spotlight Series provides in-depth analysis on specific challenges impacting family caregivers.
Webinars
Opportunities
NAC Launches Fellowship to Shape the Future of Cancer Caregiving Research
The National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) is now accepting applications for a new fellowship opportunity designed to shape the next generation of cancer caregiving research in the United States.
Building on NAC’s widely cited 2016 report Cancer Caregiving in the US: An Intense, Episodic, and Challenging Care Experience, this 12-month fellowship will support the development of a Report Planning and Analysis Framework for the upcoming update— ensuring the research reflects the evolving realities of caregivers and centers health equity
at every stage.
At a time when millions of families are navigating the complexities of cancer care, this work is more urgent than ever. The selected Fellow will play a key role in advancing rigorous, equity-centered analysis while helping translate findings into actionable policy and practice change that better support cancer caregivers nationwide.
“As the demands placed on cancer caregivers continue to grow, this Fellowship offers a unique opportunity to partner with leaders in the field to shape research reflects full complexity of caregiving and advances systemic, equity driven solutions.” – Yadira Montoya, Senior Director of Health Programs at NAC.
What the Fellowship Will Do
The Fellowship is designed to do more than advance cancer caregiving research—it aims to shape how caregiving data is analyzed, understood, and applied. Over the course of the fellowship, the selected candidate will:
- Co-develop an equity-centered analytical framework for an updated Cancer Caregiving in the US report, using NAC’s Caregiving in the US 2025 dataset
- Convene and facilitate a multidisciplinary working group of researchers, clinicians, advocates, and caregivers
- Partner with NAC’s Cancer Caregiving Collaborative members to translate findings into policy and practice recommendations and realworld impact
- Opportunity to contribute to dissemination through reports, presentations, and stakeholder engagement
A core focus of the fellowship is ensuring that diverse caregiver voices — especially those from historically underrepresented communities—are meaningfully integrated into research priorities, interpretation, practice change, and policy solutions.
Fellowship at a Glance
- Duration: 12 months (July 2026 – June 2027), with continued engagement through 2028
- Time Commitment: ~4 hours per week (with periodic peaks)
- Stipend: $15,000
- Affiliation: NAC Health Programs
- Start Date: Mid July
Who Should Apply
NAC is seeking candidates with strong research backgrounds and a demonstrated commitment to advancing cancer care in support of family caregivers, policy change, and health equity. Ideal applicants will have:
- Doctoral-level training (PhD preferred) in health services research, public health, policy, sociology, epidemiology, or a related field
- Experience with quantitative health and caregiving research
- A demonstrated interest in cancer caregiving, health equity, system change, and policy
- Experience facilitating stakeholder or community-engaged processes (strongly preferred)
Why This Fellowship Matters
Cancer caregiving is complex, evolving, and deeply personal. Yet too often, research fails to capture the full scope of caregiver experiences, especially across different communities and identities.
This fellowship is an opportunity to help change that.
By guiding how data is analyzed and interpreted, the Fellow will help ensure that the next Cancer Caregiving in the U.S. report not only reflects the realities caregivers face but also drives solutions that improve their lives.
How to Apply
Application Deadline: June 20, 2026
Selection Timeline:
- Applications reviewed the week of June 22
- Finalist interviews conducted in the week of June 30
- Fellow selected by July 10
Applicants should submit:
- A personal statement (max 750 words) outlining relevant experience, approach to the CGUS agenda, and career goals
- Current CV Applicants must also be available for a 60-minute interview during the week of June 22.
Additional details can be found in the Candidate FAQ.
Apply Today
If you are passionate about advancing caregiving research and shaping policy solutions that support families across the country, we encourage you to apply.
Please send completed applications to hr@caregiving.org.