Sometimes, taking care of someone you love is the hardest job you can do.
Nikki Lopez discovered that during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her grandmother became seriously ill and needed full-time care. No one else in the family could work from home, so Lopez volunteered, with great joy. But after two weeks, her nerves were frayed. She was, she admits guiltily, ready to throw in the towel.
“It was the longest and hardest two weeks of my life,” Lopez laughs. “My grandma is my absolute favorite person in the world, and everybody knows this. And I was stressed, I was tired, I was overwhelmed—and I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”
If she felt like this after a short time with someone she adored, what must it be like for more difficult cases or for paid caregivers, Lopez wondered? Could she start an in-home care company that provided adequate support for caregivers so they could care for others’ loved ones in a joyful way?
In 2023, she founded Caring Haven Home Care, a non-medical care agency in the San Francisco Bay area. A former banker, she went into it not really knowing much about homecare—which made the process harder but also forced her to investigate every aspect and make no assumptions. Her guiding star, she decided, would be her grandmother—who turned 90 just before press time—and her desire to provide other families with the psychological safety they needed to provide great care.
“We’re focusing and really head-on talking about all the challenges and the trust issues and the concerns that real families have and not pretend they don’t exist,” she said.
Lopez struggles with the same challenges all in the industry face—especially when it comes to hiring and retention. She says she tries to offer a slightly higher starting pay than most in the Bay area, but mostly it comes down to connecting with staff in a deep way.
“I stress out before hiring is made,” she said. “I do have an open door policy with my team. They know they’re human first. They get to talk to me about any and everything, because I understand that empowering them and making them feel valued and respected means that that is automatically going to transfer for the most part to (caring for clients’) loved ones.”
After her time in the corporate and financial worlds, she also emphasizes training and compliance, requiring over-the-minimum sessions on cybersecurity, sexual harassment and extra sessions on things like inclusivity and cultural awareness.
“Not only does that help you work with your peer, but as you go into this person’s home, whether it’s from an ethnic standpoint, cultural, LGTBQIA, whatever it is, that respect factor is there and you understand that you’re in an organization that respects humans for who they are,” Lopez said.
That same sense of respect—plus her own experience as a family caregiver—spurred Lopez to found a second project, Caregiver OneCall, a donation-supported nonprofit that operates a free 24/7 caregiver support hotline that anyone, anywhere can call.
“I remember when my mom and my sister would call during those two weeks, they never said, Nikki, how are you? It was always, ‘How is Mama?’ I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I’m here tired and stressed, is anybody going to ask me how I’m doing?”
She realized that family members aren’t trained and aren’t paid, and they’re often juggling full-time jobs and other family responsibilities—and then they’re thrown into caregiving with little to no help. The hotline aims to help, offering not just live help but also virtual training and fact sheets on topics ranging from caregiver burnout to end-of-life finances.
“We’ve gotten calls about, what do I do with these medications? Or I don’t know how to use a feeding tube,” Lopez said. “Or it could just be venting, screaming … or just needing somebody to say “How are you? You’re OK. You’re doing a good job.”