Joining the Caregiver Innovation Council

InclusiGear has joined the Caregiver Action Network’s Caregiver Innovation Council for the 2026–2027 cohort. I want to take a few minutes to explain what that means, why we said yes, and what we plan to do with the seat.

What this is

The Caregiver Action Network — CAN — is the country’s largest family-caregiver organization. They serve a broader spectrum than most people realize: parents of children with disabilities, the families of wounded soldiers, adult children caring for parents with Alzheimer’s, young couples newly facing an MS diagnosis. The whole continuum. Their network reaches more than 35,000 caregivers.

The Caregiver Innovation Council — the CIC — is CAN’s flagship convening of caregiving-technology companies. It exists to do the work the broader tech industry has historically been bad at: actually listening to caregivers about what they need, then building toward it together. Members shape the annual Caregiver Tech Insight Survey, sit in user-research panels with real families, and have a structured way to bring product ideas in front of an organization with real reach.

Why it matters to us

The conversation in care-tech is rich and growing, and the CIC’s cohort reflects that range. Companies in this room serve adult children navigating dementia, families coordinating respite for medically complex kids, partners managing chronic illness, caregivers of wounded veterans, and more. The neurodivergent-family experience is already part of that conversation, and the families and advocates carrying it have been doing the work for decades. We are not arriving to fill a missing seat. We are arriving to do a job.

What this seat changes is whose specific realities we’re committed to bringing to the table — yours. The families using InclusiCare. The parents documenting from the floor of a hallway at 11 p.m., the special-education teachers writing up handoffs between class periods, the respite workers picking up a kid for an afternoon and trying to remember what calms them down. Our job in this room is to make sure the daily-rhythm details that define your week show up when product roadmaps, research priorities, and policy positions get drafted across the industry.

The flip side of that is what we get to learn. Daily caregiving for our daughter Catie looks very different from aging in place, from dementia care, from the specific demands of complex pediatric medical conditions. We want to understand what those look like for the families living them — both because it makes us better builders, and because the more we understand each other across the spectrum of caregiving, the harder it becomes for any one of us to be overlooked.

What we’re going to do with the seat

A few concrete things I’m committing to publicly so you can hold us to them:

Bring the neurodivergent-family lens to the Tech Insight Survey. When the 2026 questions get drafted, we’ll push for items that reflect the realities of disability and behavioral-needs caregiving — not just the chronic-illness and elder-care defaults. We want the data the rest of the industry uses to include our families.

Show up at the user-research panels. CAN runs caregiver insight panels two-to-four times a year. We’ll be there, listening to caregivers outside our own user base, including across conditions we don’t directly serve. The best way to avoid building a narrow product is to keep listening to people who aren’t your customers yet.

Share what we learn. Anything we hear in CIC sessions that isn’t confidential, we’ll write up here. If we change the product because of something we heard, we’ll say so out loud. Building in public stays the rule.

What this is not

Membership in the CIC is not an endorsement. CAN doesn’t endorse products, and we’re not going to imply otherwise. The badge you’ll see on our site and in my email signature means we’re at the table — not that anyone is vouching for our app over anyone else’s.

What it does mean is that the work we’re doing for families like mine, and like yours, has been recognized as worth a seat in a national conversation. That’s enough to be honored by.

A thank you

Thank you to the Caregiver Action Network for the invitation, and to the families in our early-access community whose perspective gave us anything worth bringing to the table.

If you’re a caregiver of a neurodivergent child or adult, and you want your voice to reach this conversation, tell us what’s hard. We will carry it in with us.