The Serious Side of Care
Working with the Petro-Canada CareMakers Foundation, I learned a troubling statistic: 1 in 4 Canadians spend an average of 19 hours a week caring for a loved one. Even worse, because the labour, exhaustion, and emotional toll often happen behind closed doors, the realities of caregiving remain largely unseen. It means that caregiving is often overlooked and undervalued by most Canadians; it means that no one realizes how serious care is until they have to do it themselves.
For radio, we partnered with stand-up comedian Gerry Dee to challenge the audience’s perceptions of caregiving in a way that remained true to Gerry’s own personal lived experiences with fanily caregiving.
In print we brought to life three distinct caregiving stories that started as typical saturday morning comic strips before morphing into serious depictions of care in vivid detail. We partnered with animation studio Titmouse to create the series which ran for a month in the Globe and Mail and Postmedia.
Some behind the scenes of the process:
