Amanda Krisher did not set out to become a social worker. She came from a family where healthcare was the lingua franca, where dinner table conversation turned naturally to questions of care and cure, but she had not yet found the particular dialect that would become her own. She was working as a caseworker for a local department of social services, doing the daily work of navigating bureaucracies on behalf of people who needed help, when her colleagues began to suggest that she pursue formal training in social work. It was less a revelation than a recognition. She enrolled, and immediately felt the click of something falling into place. This was not merely a career path. This was a calling.
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What Krisher discovered in social work was a field capacious enough to contain her instincts and structured enough to sharpen them. It was a profession that valued both heart and intellect, that required you to see people whole rather than as collections of symptoms or problems to be solved. She fell in love with it, she says, and the language is precise. It was love in the sense of finding something you did not know you were looking for and then wondering how you had lived without it.
Her education in the real texture of people's lives began early. Krisher had grown up surrounded by older adults. Both sets of grandparents, multiple great-grandparents—these were not distant figures visited on holidays but integral presences in her daily world. She absorbed, without entirely realizing it, a comfort with aging that many people never develop, a sense that older adults were not a category apart but simply people at a different point in the same journey everyone was making. This early immersion gave her what no textbook could: an intuitive understanding that aging is not a problem to be managed but a stage of life to be lived with dignity and purpose.
When she became a hospice social worker, that understanding deepened into something more urgent and more specific. Hospice work strips away illusions. You sit with people at the end of their lives, and you learn what matters and what does not. Krisher found herself learning from her clients and their families in ways that formal training had not prepared her for. She came to understand the critical needs of older adults not as abstractions but as lived realities. She saw the gaps in the system, the places where institutions failed to meet people where they actually were. She saw the difference that one person, properly trained and genuinely attentive, could make in transforming someone's experience of illness and mortality.
The work was fulfilling but also limited in scope. Krisher could help the individuals in front of her, but she could not address the larger systems that shaped their options and experiences. When the opportunity came to join the National Council on Aging, she recognized it as a chance to operate at a different scale. Here was a platform that could amplify individual care into systemic change, that could work toward creating the conditions for all older adults to age well. It was not an abandonment of direct service but an expansion of it, a way of taking everything she had learned at the bedside and the kitchen table and translating it into policy and program design.
Krisher now works as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Arlington, Virginia, but her reach extends far beyond any single geography. She has been an adjunct professor and a curriculum developer, roles that allow her to shape the next generation of practitioners. She has worked in community health settings where the challenges are preventive rather than palliative. Each position has given her a different vantage point on the same essential question: how do we create a society where people can age with dignity, connection, and purpose?
What distinguishes Krisher's approach is her insistence on seeing social work as healthcare, not as an adjunct to it. "Many people may not consider social workers to be healthcare professionals," she says, "but the work that we do truly makes a difference for both physical and mental health." This is not a defensive claim but a statement of fact. Social workers bring a person-centered, empathetic focus to situations that more traditional healthcare professionals might approach purely through a medical lens. They ask different questions. They notice different things. They help teams see patients as whole human beings embedded in families and communities rather than as bodies with malfunctioning parts.
The culture of healthcare, Krisher believes, has been too siloed for too long. Doctors confer with doctors, nurses with nurses, social workers with social workers, and the patient sits at the center of all this fragmented expertise without anyone quite putting the pieces together. She envisions something different: a truly collaborative model where every professional working with an individual, along with that individual themselves, comes to the table to pool knowledge and develop treatment plans that address the whole person. It requires healthcare workers to speak up, to ask questions that might seem outside their lane, to think creatively about problems that have been approached the same way for decades. Change, she knows, will only happen if people work for it.
To those considering social work, Krisher offers advice that is both practical and philosophical. The field is vast and varied, she reminds them. You can work in hospitals or schools, with children or elders, in policy or direct practice. The key is to think carefully about what matters most to you, what brings you joy, what kind of impact you want to have in the world. And if something sparks your interest but feels unfamiliar or intimidating, don't turn away from it. Dig in. Explore. You may find exactly what you are looking for, even if you did not know you were looking for it.
There is something almost radical in Krisher's fundamental orientation toward her work. She feels honored to be a social worker. Not proud in the ordinary sense, though she is certainly that, but honored, as though the profession has bestowed something on her rather than the other way around. It is an attitude that transforms the nature of professional service. If you approach your work as an honor, you bring a different quality of attention to it. You recognize that you are being trusted with something precious: people's stories, their vulnerabilities, their hopes for whatever time they have left.
Amanda Krisher has built a career on the conviction that how we age matters, that the conditions under which people grow old are not fixed by nature but shaped by choices we make collectively. She has moved from helping one person at a time to helping design systems that could help thousands, but she has not lost sight of the individual human being at the center of every policy discussion. She brings to her work the accumulated wisdom of grandparents who taught her that aging is simply life continuing, of dying patients who taught her what people need when everything else falls away, and of a profession that taught her how to translate compassion into action. She is building, piece by patient piece, the architecture of a society that knows how to honor its elders.