Ai-jen
Ai-jen Poo is the President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Executive Director of Caring Across Generations. A veteran organizer, advocate, and cultural strategist, she has spent more than 25 years building a movement to change the way our country values and supports caregiving and care work.
Poo began her career organizing domestic workers in New York City. She helped create Domestic Workers United, a multiracial coalition of nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers that was instrumental in winning the New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (2010), the first law in the United States to guarantee basic rights and protections for domestic workers.
In 2007, Poo co-founded the National Domestic Workers Alliance alongside domestic worker leaders from across the country. Under Poo’s leadership, NDWA has grown into an alliance of 70 local affiliate organizations and a community of over 400,000 workers. NDWA has won domestic worker bills of rights in 13 states, two cities, and the District of Columbia.
In 2011, Poo launched Caring Across Generations, a national organization driving change in our culture and policy to elevate and support caregiving at every stage of life. Caring Across has led the charge for authentic representation of care in film and television, helped secure care investments in states across the country, and, during the Biden administration, helped enact the most sweeping executive order on care in history.
A widely recognized expert on the care economy, Poo has been named a MacArthur “Genius,” one of Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, and one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. Her acclaimed book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America, was published in 2015. Poo earned a B.A. in women and gender studies at Columbia University and holds honorary degrees from CUNY and The New School. She is currently a Trustee of the Ford Foundation and a Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics.