Amy Money did not set out to revolutionize elder care. She set out, as so many young mothers do, to find work that would allow her to be present for her children while also making an impact in the world. This is not the kind of ambition that announces itself with fanfare. It is quieter, more practical, rooted in the immediate needs of a particular life at a particular moment. And yet it was precisely this grounding in the specific and the personal that would eventually lead her to see what so many others had missed: that the systems we have built to care for the elderly are not failing because of a lack of good intentions, but because they have forgotten to care for the people doing the caring.
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In Matthews, North Carolina, where Money now serves as executive director and owner of a boutique assisted living facility, this understanding has become the foundation of everything she does. But the path to this realization was not direct. It began, as many meaningful journeys do, with simply showing up and paying attention.
When Money first trained as an occupational therapy assistant, the appeal was straightforward. The work was meaningful. The hours were manageable. She could help people while still being home for dinner. It was, in other words, a sensible choice for someone trying to balance the competing demands of work and family. What she did not anticipate was how thoroughly the work would take hold of her imagination, or how her initial modest goals would gradually transform into something more ambitious and more urgent.
Working primarily with older adults, Money began to notice patterns that troubled her. It was not that individual caregivers lacked compassion or skill. Rather, it was that the systems themselves seemed designed without adequate consideration for the actual humans they were meant to serve. Older adults were processed rather than understood. Families were left to navigate complex systems that seemed indifferent to their exhaustion and grief. And the caregivers themselves, those who had chosen this work out of genuine dedication, were too often treated as interchangeable parts in a machine that valued efficiency over humanity.
This recognition did not arrive all at once. It accumulated slowly, conversation by conversation, patient by patient. Money spent her days working with people who had lived through the Depression and World War II, who had raised families and built careers, who had accumulated decades of knowledge and experience. And she noticed that these rich, complex lives were often reduced to diagnoses and care plans, as if a person's value could be measured solely by their current functional abilities rather than by the fullness of their existence.
What struck her most was how often the system failed not just the elderly themselves, but their families. She would sit with adult children who were trying desperately to care for aging parents while managing their own jobs and families. She saw the toll it took, the way caregiving could become all-consuming, the way people could lose themselves in the effort to care for someone else. And she began to understand that any truly effective approach to elder care would need to address this larger ecosystem, recognizing that when families struggle, everyone suffers.
This understanding became the cornerstone of her philosophy when she eventually transitioned from clinical practice to leadership. As an executive director and owner, Money found herself in a position to actually reshape the structures that had frustrated her for so long. Her boutique assisted living facility operates on a principle that sounds simple but proves transformative in practice: care for the caregivers, and they will be able to truly care for others.
What this means in concrete terms is that staff are not treated as expendable resources but as essential partners in a shared mission. They are given the time and space to build genuine relationships with residents. They are supported when they face their own challenges. They are encouraged to bring their full selves to work rather than to perform a scripted version of care that prioritizes documentation over human connection. The goal is to create an environment where caregiving is sustainable, where people can do this work for years without burning out, where the job nourishes rather than depletes.
Money's reaffirmation of purpose comes in moments that might seem unremarkable to an outside observer. A family member calls, exhausted and overwhelmed, having struggled alone to care for a parent who needs more help than one person can provide. Or someone shares their experience with a previous facility that failed their loved one, where policies took precedence over people, where efficiency mattered more than dignity. These conversations remind her why the work matters. They confirm that the problem she has dedicated herself to solving is not abstract but painfully, persistently real.
Her advice to those entering the field reflects this hard-won wisdom. She tells students and early-career professionals to resist the pressure to see their work as primarily technical or procedural. Yes, clinical skills matter. Yes, protocols serve a purpose. But the heart of the work, she insists, lies in something more fundamental: the willingness to sit down and truly listen to the people you serve.
Money's favorite moments in her career have always involved exactly this kind of listening. Sitting with an older adult and hearing about their life, about experiences from decades past, about times and places she will never see firsthand. This is not simply reminiscing or a way to pass the time. It is, rather, an essential form of recognition. It acknowledges that the person before her is not primarily a patient or a resident or a care recipient, but a human being who has lived a full and meaningful life, who has loved and lost and learned and contributed, who deserves to be seen in their wholeness rather than reduced to their current needs.
This person-centered approach requires more than good intentions. It requires a fundamental shift in how healthcare professionals understand their role. When Money puts on scrubs and goes to work, she feels a weight of responsibility but also a sense of privilege. The work matters not because it involves impressive technical skills or complex medical interventions, but because it offers the opportunity to make a genuine difference in someone's day, someone's comfort, someone's sense of being valued and understood.
Looking toward the future of healthcare, Money sees reasons for both concern and hope. She would like to see systems that reward prevention as much as they currently reward intervention. She wants insurance and payment systems that reward people for staying healthy rather than only stepping in when something goes wrong. This is not a new idea, but it remains stubbornly difficult to implement in a healthcare system that pays doctors for treating illness rather than promoting wellness.
What gives her optimism is the younger generation entering the field. They are, she has noticed, more attuned to questions of wellness, mental health, work-life balance, and holistic care than previous generations were. They understand instinctively what took her years to learn: that health is not merely the absence of disease but the presence of well-being. If they can maintain this broader vision while navigating the pressures and compromises of actual practice, they may be able to shift the system in ways that have long seemed impossible.
Money's own trajectory suggests that such shifts are possible, though rarely easy. She moved from wanting a job that fit around her family responsibilities to building an organization that challenges fundamental assumptions about how elder care should work. She went from accepting the system as it was to reimagining what it could be. This transformation did not mean leaving behind her original practical concerns but rather pursuing them to where they naturally led. If you truly want to serve people well, you must create conditions that allow caregivers to do their best work. If you genuinely believe in person-centered care, you must extend that philosophy to everyone in the ecosystem, not just the residents.
What emerges from Money's story is not a simple narrative of professional success but something more interesting: a portrait of someone who learned to see the profound in the everyday, who recognized that the most transformative changes often begin with the smallest acts of attention and respect. Her work in Matthews may be modest in scale, but it represents an ambitious vision of what healthcare could be if we built our systems around the actual experiences and needs of human beings rather than around numbers and operational efficiency.
The older adults she serves have lived through enormous changes. They have seen technologies transform daily life, watched social structures evolve, experienced both the best and worst of what human beings can do to one another. They contain entire worlds of knowledge and experience. And they deserve, in their final years, to be cared for by people who see them not as problems to be managed but as individuals worthy of respect, attention, and genuine human connection.
This is the vision that guides Money's work. It is not flashy or particularly innovative in a technological sense. It does not promise to disrupt industries or achieve exponential growth. But it offers something perhaps more valuable: a model of care that treats people, all people, with the dignity they deserve. In a healthcare system too often characterized by burnout, red tape, and financial pressures, this amounts to a quiet revolution. And it begins, as all meaningful change must, with the simple but profound act of paying attention to what is actually happening in front of you and being willing to imagine that things could be different.