Filipinx mother, daughter, caregiver, and national best selling author, Angela Garbes will join us as our keynote speaker for our “What Matters Most” luncheon on April 27.
In her book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela describes her parent’s journey from the Philippines to the US as health care workers. A path to economic opportunity for many thousands of Filipinx immigrants, a path born of colonization, capitalism, and racism.
Working parents can relate to Angela’s experience balancing writing, home schooling, house work, and how women bear a disproportionate responsibility of caring for the family.
We need her message of valuing both paid and unpaid caring for our children, our elders, and our community now more than ever as society moves on with their lives post COVID. She reminds us that,
“Over the course of the pandemic, many people came to understand—for the first time, deeply, or with renewed urgency—that American life is not working for families. Phrases like advance child tax credit, direct stimulus payments, prison abolition, and care as infrastructure have entered everyday conversation. The shift was sudden and powerful.”
At our What Matters Most event, guests will have the opportunity to experience the brilliance of some of our youth. Their potential, their optimism is because of the caring adults at home, in their classrooms, and after school at Neighborhood House’s youth programs.
Caring for our children, our elders, our community is what we do at Neighborhood House. And in addition to providing direct care, we are also working to change systems and attitudes about people experiencing poverty and people in need of care (which is all of us at some point in our lives).
Angela challenges us with this thought:
“The economy could stand to bend to the will of decency and care. What if we built a system that lets us actually care for the people who care for us?”
