Members of the Iowa CareGivers Association (ICA) lobbied their legislators on January 29, talking about the need for better pay, better benefits, and better training and education for Iowa’s direct-care workers.

The caregivers also asked their legislators about their personal experiences with caregiving, as part of a push by the ICA to collect and publish stories of legislators and others who have been, in the words of the ICA’s theme for 2008, “touched by a caregiver.”

“The value of that is, it forces legislators to think completely differently about direct-care workers,” says ICA Policy Director John Hale. “When they start to think about direct-care workers in terms of their own lives, it becomes real, not just one of the hundreds of issues they have to deal with every day. It becomes more of a priority.”