Lisa Guide on the Caregiver Vote
February 10, 2021
This episode features a conversation with Lisa Guide, co-founder of the Women Effect Action Fund, a group dedicated to achieving economic equality for women in our country. Lisa and her colleagues have spent the last four years focused on turning out the caregiver vote, and thanks to them, women came out in force to vote in this past election, motivated by care economy issues. These are working moms, who have silently struggled for decades to fulfill their historical caregiver roles while also holding down jobs, often as the primary wage earners in their homes. Lisa and Nancy talk about why everyone loses when women must choose between staying home with a sick child or losing a day’s pay; why policies like paid family leave and childcare are just as important to our economy and infrastructure as bridges and roads; and how Covid has made the situation exponentially worse. This emergent caregiver voting bloc is urban, suburban and rural, Democrat, Republican and Independent and is a force to be reckoned with. In other words, I am woman, hear me roar.
Lisa Guide is a Co-Founder of the Women Effect Action Fund and an Associate Director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which she joined in 2002. Prior, she was founder and executive director of a nonprofit strategic communications firm, but most of her career has been spent in government and politics. Lisa was in federal service for all eight years of President Clinton’s administration, serving in a variety of positions at the Interior Department and the White House. These included acting Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Policy, Management and Budget and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs. Lisa also served two years at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. She spent eight years working in politics and government in New Jersey, as state communications director of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and communications director for the N.J. State Attorney General. Lisa also serves as a foundation representative on the Board of Trustees of the Democracy Alliance.
