Sarah Jones & Ai-jen Poo Are Fighting For Caregiver Support One Joke (& Law) at a Time

Comedian, artist and Tony-Award winner Sarah Jones has been performing one-woman shows, including Sell/Buy/Date, where she plays numerous inspiring characters for the last few decades. One of her characters in Sell/Buy/Date was inspired by the work of Ai-jen Poo, who is a labor activist, award-winning organizer and author, the President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Director of Caring Across Generations. This summer, they embarked on a tour of Jones’s new show, The Cost of Not Caring. It is part of “Care on Tour,” a larger summer storytelling and advocacy initiative by Caring Across Generations. The one-woman show focuses on the joy, humor, and challenges of providing and receiving care. Together, Jones and Poo, are trying to improve caregiver support through advocacy and legislation. SheKnows sat down with the two women ahead of their next tour stop on September 19 in Detroit where Jones will be bringing to life the importance of care. She (and her many characters) will make you laugh, cry, and most of all, care.

SheKnows: How did you two decide to join forces and partner up on “The Cost of Not Caring?” Because you’re both magical on your own, together, I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen. You’re going to fix care in America.

Sarah Jones: Actually, I think it’s fair to say the show in Chicago was an outgrowth of Ai-jen’s vision and my shared vision after we did #Carefest, which was this huge, amazing event that Ai-jen did almost a year ago here in LA, and it sparked a conversation, but I’ll let her say more.

Ai-jen Poo: Well, like you, I have been a fan of Sarah’s work literally for a long time. We won’t say how many decades, but every time I hear different care stories from caregivers around the country, I often think about Sarah because she’s able to bring forward the beauty of the different experiences that exist across this country through the threads of what we share from a value standpoint, and just bring both to life in such a powerful way. We invited her to #Carefest, because I believed that sparks would fly and she would be inspired by the care stories she heard, but then also really inspire the room with the care stories that she could tell.

And so we put her on stage, and magic started to happen, as always. After that, we kind of both reconnected around there’s something here, and it feels incredibly powerful. We thought, “well, let’s just start taking it on the road and talking to caregivers, and so Sarah has been you can say more about the process, the artistic process, but I think it’s been such a joy for us to connect Sarah with real caregivers who are doing the work, showing up for their loved ones and kind of feeding that into Sarah’s creative process has been really amazing.

SK: I think upwards of 80% of caregivers in America are women and they have little support. What brought your attention to this matter and how did you decide to dedicate your time to advocating for caregiving support? Sarah, how are you using comedy to get people to care about this?

SJ: So if we go back, when I did my a play called Sell/Buy/Date about, what women go through, and the difficulties of this economy. One of the inspirations for one of my characters is, Ai-jen’s work. [Morphs into character]. She was a woman who was talking about, you know, dealing with… “I was a domestic worker. They don’t pay you. You have to flip them over.” You know, she had a real, beautiful story about these intersections that Ai-jen’s work, you know, makes so clear, right? She’s an immigrant, she’s a woman of color, she’s dealing with economic issues, and her own kids, you know, trying to kind of flourish. And from there, I knew there was something I wanted to do.

What are the most powerful stories right now that need to be told? I have this podcast called, “America, who hurt you?” and Ai-jen was my first guest, talking about the intersections of where do we need to go as a country and care? PS, there’s no separating those things. If you don’t have care, you don’t have America, and you have to come to the show to see what that means. But you know, always, when I hear Ai-jen, there’s inspiration there, because of the way she understands care is threaded through every aspect of our lives. There is no one who’s not touched by this issue, even if it’s just the lack of care in their lives, right?

SK: Ai-jen, your career has kind of been oriented to caregiving support. How has that led to where you are today in terms trying to improve the caregiving system?

AJP: I started out following nannies around New York City, because I was just so I think moved by the fact that there was this invisible army of mostly immigrant women who are caring for these young children, these older people, people with disabilities, and they’re sort of the quiet, invisible army that makes it possible for everyone else to go to work in this bustling city. I was just fascinated by and really deeply moved by their stories. A lot of them had left their own families in other countries in order to earn a living, to be able to support them and send money back home and they care for other people’s families in order to do that. That kind of chain of care was something, coming from an immigrant family, that I could really connect to.

I very quickly realized that being a being a domestic worker is a profession that requires skill, expertise, experience, enormous capacity for adaptation, creativity, generosity, patience, all these things, and it’s often treated as less than a real job. There’s an informality of the treatment. And I remember thinking like, why is it so difficult for people to understand that this is a job deserving of the kind of respect and protections at other jobs? And then I realized the whole way that care workers, domestic workers, are treated, is just a symptom of this deeper issue, which is that our society has never really valued care, whether it’s done by family members or friends, community or professionals we’ve never accounted for this enormous part of our lives and this enormous amount of energy and work that goes into making sure that our children have the support they need, making sure that our aging loved ones have the care that they need, that we can all live with an amount of dignity and support at every stage of life.

We just have kind of taken for granted that women will handle it, either women in our families will handle it, or underpaid women, oftentimes, women of color, immigrant women will handle it as professionals.

SK: I think you need to write The Nanny Diaries, the real Nanny Diaries.

SJ: Yes!!

SK: When it comes to caring for your parents, affordable childcare, access, often, jobs don’t really support that. How do you think the cost of care can be lowered? Ai-jen, I believe JD Vance suggested you get your aunts, uncles, grandparents, cats to help babysit. But I don’t have a cat. Seriously, and I know that Trump had also not answered the question when he was asked.

SJ: No, he didn’t.

AJP: No, they won’t come out and say it, but the implication of their approach to care is that women should essentially stay home and care for kids, and that’s just not ever been the reality for so many millions of women in our country, working with class, working for women, have never had the option of not actually bringing in an income to help pay the bills, and frankly, when we talk about freedom, we should have an economy where women and people of all genders have the freedom to pursue work or not and have it be a real choice. And what they’re proposing is not a real choice. But what Vice President Harris and President Biden and others have proposed is that in the United States, we don’t spend more than 7% of our income on child care. Right now, it’s closer to 25 or 30% that families with working parents with young children spend on child care, and that is way above what any economic indicator would classify as affordable.

We’re trying to make child care affordable by making sure that no one has to spend more than 7% which means that it would be subsidized. This is an investment in our future. It’s not a giveaway, it’s not welfare. This is like education, like infrastructure. This is an investment in a healthy society and a strong workforce. And so that’s kind of, I think, the approach that Vice President Harris and President Biden have taken. In Canada, for example, no one spends more than $10 per day on child care. This is possible.

SK: So, what does success look like for this vision you both have? Sarah, you’re using humor, you’re telling all the jokes to try and get people to connect to this. You have 27 characters in your head right now. Ai-jen, what does the future look like?

AJP: The long-term vision here is that every single person who is touched by the need for care, whether it’s childcare, aging, disability care or paid family medical leave, but everyone who is caring for someone else or relies on care in some way, which is basically all of us, sees themselves in a vision for the future where care is fully supported and valued in our country, and they feel like they are.

I think the goal is for as many people, through Sarah’s incredible mosaic of humans, is able to find pieces of their own experience in their own story, and connect to them in a way that helps them see that, one, they’re not alone, and two, that there are solutions that they can be a part of achieving for our country. That’s the vision and goal.

SJ: When Ai-jen talked about chasing nannies around New York, it was the same for me. It’s about the connection to people. If you don’t truly feel empathy, you don’t have that mirror for yourself, right? As an artist, I need to see the change now in the theater, when people come up and say, “My God, I haven’t even thought about that!” As Ai-jen says, I’m in the sandwich generation. They’re caring for their kids. They’re caring for their aging parents. They (may) have a child with disabilities, like people don’t see themselves until you hold up that mirror in the theater or screen.

Ai-jen, I believe, is poised to create a revolution in the care, a true care, economy. Maybe it will be a department of care before we know it.

SK: Tell me what you both care most about right now, for yourselves. You are doing so much work for others, but I often feel, women never get to care about themselves. What is one thing that you care about for yourself, and what is one thing that you do not care about and you’re just letting it go.

Ai-jen: What I care about for myself is sleep, because I’m perimenopausal and it is not to be taken for granted. It is like a rough out here. I care a lot about sleep and honestly, I feel the Vice President has brought the joy back to politics in a way that feels so welcome. And what I don’t care at all about is wearing cute shoes anymore. I’m done with cute shoes, because it’s not worth it.

SK: It’s not worth it, comfort is cute. Let’s just take a nap and be comfortable. Sarah how about you?

SJ: What I care most about is healing our trauma. I really do. And it starts with me. I didn’t get the care I needed as a kid. I’m actually healing through having Ai-jen to talk about care on America, Who Hurt You? You know, it’s fun, it’s silly to be like, “America, girl, who hurt you.” But it’s also I get to hear her, you know, it  washes over me and heals me. I get to come home to myself through storytelling. It’s where I feel the most love. So, I’m doing some inner child work right now. That feels really good. If it sounds crazy to people… Inner child work all day. And then what I don’t care about people who think inner child work is cringe.

SK: Thank you so much for this. This work is so important. The next show stop on the tour will be in Detroit on September 19. Ai-jen, enjoy the airport, and take a nap on the plane. Sarah, please say hello to your inner child for us.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Before you go, check out the all-time best ‘Outlander’ episodes you need to watch.