24/7
Care never clocks out
As ALS progresses, a family caregiver handles transfers, feeding, suctioning, breathing equipment, and overnight repositioning. The job does not pause at 5 p.m., and there is no second shift to hand it to.
Student-founded · Tri-Valley, California
Caring for those who care for ALS patients.
Supporting unpaid family caregivers with financial relief, respite funding, and student volunteer power.
Fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3) · 100% tax-deductible · Public ledger
93%
To direct care & relief
$250-$1,000
Per quarterly grant
0
Paid staff or overhead
4x
Award rounds a year
The problem no one funds
The hidden crisis of ALS caregiving
ALS takes away a person’s ability to move, speak, eat, and breathe. What gets far less attention is what it does to the spouse, parent, or teenager who becomes a full-time nurse overnight — unpaid, untrained, and uninsured.
0 days
Zero paid time off
Family caregivers are unpaid. They accrue no vacation, no sick leave, and no paid family leave in most situations, so a day of rest is a day of lost wages on top of an unstaffed home.
2nd job
Mandatory extra hours
Many caregivers pick up overtime or a second job to cover equipment, co-pays, and home modifications, then come home to a full night of care. Exhaustion becomes the baseline, not the exception.
365
No holidays, no breaks
Birthdays, holidays, a child's school play, their own doctor's appointment: caregivers routinely miss all of it, because leaving the house means finding and paying for someone to take over.
Uncovered
No health insurance of their own
Caregivers who leave the workforce often lose employer health coverage precisely when the physical and mental toll of caregiving is highest. The caregiver's own health becomes the next casualty.
$0 covered
Respite care is out of pocket
Hiring a professional home health aide for even a few hours is typically paid entirely out of pocket. Insurance rarely reimburses respite for a family member, so rest carries a price tag most families cannot pay.
Everything we fund answers one question that the care system currently does not: who covers the caregiver?
Our mission & local roots
An independent, youth-led nonprofit built in Dublin, California
Cover The Caregiver was founded by students atThe Quarry Lane School in Dublin, CA, after watching a classmate’s family absorb the full weight of an ALS diagnosis with almost no outside support.
We are not a chapter of a larger charity and we are not affiliated with any school district. We are an independent project, run entirely by high school students, uniting clubs acrossDublin, Pleasanton, Livermore, and the wider Bay Area to put real money and real hours back into caregivers’ lives.
Our promise is deliberately narrow: we fund the caregiver. Not conferences, not merchandise, not overhead — the person holding the family together.
Photo slot: student volunteers with a local family
Founded
2026
By a high school junior
Based in
Dublin, CA
Serving the Tri-Valley first
How we help
Three pillars of support
Money, hands, and a voice. Each pillar addresses a different part of the same gap, and each one is measurable.
01
Direct financial respite micro-grants
Fast, small, high-impact grants of $250 to $1,000 that buy a family real hours of professional respite care, cover lost income from a missed shift, or close the gap on equipment and utilities.
- Quarterly award rounds with a published ledger
- Funds paid toward care hours, not paperwork
- Transparent, published prioritization matrix
02
Youth volunteer support & school club network
Trained high school volunteers give caregivers back their afternoons: running errands, handling yard work and meal prep, providing companionship visits, and organizing supply drives.
- Chapters forming across Tri-Valley high schools
- Background-aware, supervised volunteer placements
- Non-medical support only, always family-directed
03
Advocacy for caregiver insurance & coverage
We document the coverage gap we see in every application and bring it to school boards, city councils, and state representatives: unpaid family caregivers deserve paid leave and insured respite hours.
- Anonymized, aggregated data from our grant rounds
- Student-authored testimony and public comment
- Coalition-building with regional ALS organizations
$500 will buy a caregiver twenty hours of sleep.
That is what a single quarterly micro-grant is designed to fund in professional respite care. We have not awarded our first one yet. You can be the reason we do.