We have a kind of residual approach to broader social support. It relies on the family to be the lead. We have a growing number of families who, themselves, are caregivers. They can't provide the backup support, and they are burning out. We have a hugely disproportionate number of kids with disabilities in child welfare, etc.
Our approach to this is community-based support systems that provide backup to family caregivers. We need to provide support to families themselves to connect and to develop their own leadership in their own communities to drive change. We need respite systems that provide families with backup respite. We need families to have access to navigators in order to navigate the community.
I think there is a clear role for the federal government in supporting the key infrastructure that enables families to connect and provides those navigation systems. It's not just a social service. If families are going to be the social infrastructure that we increasingly rely on them to be, we need the federal government to invest in the capacity of communities to enable families to play that role. It's not a social service. It's a piece of social infrastructure. With regard to that piece that supports families being the caregivers and leaders in their communities around this issue, I think there's a really legitimate role for the federal government to play, and we have lots of models for that.