What’s In It For You?

Last week I had dinner with an old friend and later joined her boyfriend and several of his colleagues for a drink. He is a physician: thoughtful, intelligent, and clearly a caring person. At some point in the conversation he asked about my work.

I told him about the caregiving systems we are trying to build in Santa Fe. I talked about caregivers supporting one another directly instead of relying entirely on centralized management. I talked about trying to create more sustainable schedules, stronger relationships, and a more stable caregiving community.

He listened carefully and then asked, “What’s in it for you?”

I said I hoped we were helping create a better caregiving community in Santa Fe.

“No,” he said. “What’s in it for you?”

I tried again. I said I wanted caregivers to have a new way to be in the world, more supported, more professional, more connected to one another.

“But what’s in it for you?”

The conversation continued like this for several minutes. I talked about reducing burnout. About helping caregivers stay in the field longer. About building systems where people could support one another more naturally. Each answer seemed incomplete to him.

Finally I laughed and asked, “Are you talking about money?”

“Well yeah,” he said.

So I explained that a percentage of each hour of care supports the administrative systems that keep the organization running.

“Oh,” he said, visibly relieved. “So you get a cut.”

Finally, we understood each other. Or at least we understood why we had not understood each other.

He wasn’t being cynical. He was being fluent in a language most of us speak without thinking: that the point of work is what comes back to you. I speak it too, but what I want back most just isn’t money.

Money matters, of course it does. The service side of the organization I lead is self-sustaining, meaning it covers payroll, administration, and the other costs of keeping things running. But the financial structure is not the point of the work for me. It is what allows the work to continue.

And the work itself is very particular.

Caregiving is complex work. It requires technical skill, emotional regulation, patience, adaptability, trust, and presence.

This complex work, when done well, opens onto something extraordinary.

A frightened person relaxes because someone familiar walked through the door. A caregiver notices a subtle change in someone’s condition before it becomes an emergency. A daughter wrought with worry finally sleeps through the night because she trusts the person staying with her father. A team member picks up a shift so another caregiver can attend her daughter’s graduation.

These moments of connection, comfort, and community are what the whole structure is built around. The schedules, the relationships, the way caregivers support one another: all of it designed to make that comfort more durable and the community less fragile.

Caregiving communities grow stronger when the businesses and other organizations inside them are structured around trust rather than the kind of extraction my friend was looking for. More people get good care. More caregivers stay in the field. I think those impacts can spread into our entire community, and I hope we find out together if I am right.

That’s what’s in it for me.

This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on May 19, 2026, under Business Different.