At thirteen, Travis Friot arrived at his aunt's house in New York expecting a summer of ordinary teenage freedom. Instead, she had arranged something else entirely: a volunteer position at the local nursing home. It was the kind of parental intervention that could have seemed like an obligation. Instead, it became a revelation.
He spent that summer in the activities department, bringing what he calls "daily joy" to residents and listening to their life stories. It was 1990s optimism made concrete at the first Eden Alternative nursing home, a place that insisted the elderly deserved not just maintenance but genuine connection. For young Friot, it became one of his most meaningful experiences, the kind that quietly rewrites the trajectory of a life.
His late grandmother, Donna, had shown him something about dignity. She had not been a healthcare professional herself, but she possessed the quality that distinguishes true caregivers: an attention to the wholeness of a person. When Friot speaks of her influence, it is clear she taught him not through lessons but through example, the way that most important things are often learned.
Now, from Charlotte, North Carolina, Friot runs AgeWell Advocacy, providing geriatric care management to people aged fifty-five and older across the United States. His consultations happen by phone and video, a decidedly modern approach to an ancient human need. Over more than a decade as a gerontologist, he has built something both traditional and radical: a practice founded on the belief that quality of life matters at every age, and that advocacy should be accessible.
As a gay and disabled business owner, Friot has directed considerable attention toward creating care that serves LGBTQ+ individuals and people with disabilities, communities he knows intimately. He understands, from the inside, what it means to navigate systems not designed with you in mind. This is not abstract empathy but lived knowledge, the kind that shapes how you build a practice. When he creates inclusive services, he is building the kind of care he himself would want to receive.
There are experiences that confirm what we already suspect about ourselves, and then there are experiences that reveal what we did not know we knew. For Friot, working in long-term care settings brought both. He watched residents who could not advocate for themselves. He watched residents who had no family to advocate for them. He watched, in particular, those in dementia care, whose voices had been lost to a disease that steals language before it steals memory, and memory before it steals the self.
In one assisted living community, Friot encountered a problem that was simultaneously administrative and profoundly human. Residents lacked basic necessities: toiletries, clothing, the small dignities that separate care from mere custody. The solution was not in his job description. He matched every resident to a community sponsor. It was work that required him to become a bridge between isolation and connection, between need and resource, between the institutional logic of care and the actual requirements of human flourishing.
"I went above my job description," he says, "because I truly care." The statement is straightforward, almost understated. But it contains within it an entire philosophy of professional life. There is the job, and then there is the work. The job is what you are paid to do. The work is what you cannot help but do.
When Friot speaks to students and early-career professionals, he does not offer the usual pieties about following your passion or believing in yourself. Instead, he suggests something more practical and more demanding: test your commitment early. Volunteer. Find paid work in the setting that interests you. Discover whether your interest can survive contact with reality.
"It's been so important for me to have a sense of purpose in the work that I do," he explains. This is not the language of ambition but of sustainability. Purpose is what allows you to go above your job description not once, in a moment of inspiration, but repeatedly, as a practice. Purpose is what keeps you returning to work that can be heartbreaking, frustrating, undervalued, and essential.
Friot's definition of what it means to be a healthcare professional is uncompromising. Empathy is not optional. It is the foundation. "The moment you stop caring about the work you're doing and the people you're impacting," he says, "it may be time to reevaluate if this is the career for you."
He understands that people come to healthcare professionals at their most vulnerable moments. This is not something to take for granted. It is, instead, the entire point. Vulnerability is not a bug in the system of human aging and illness. It is the system itself. And how we respond to that vulnerability, whether we meet it with attention or indifference, with creativity or routine, determines not just the quality of care but the quality of our society.
Friot's vision for the future of healthcare is practical rather than idealistic. He wants to see technology incorporated ethically, in ways that alleviate rather than exacerbate the shortage of healthcare professionals. He imagines technology supporting long-term care staff so they can spend the time actually needed to care for their residents. Time: the resource that is always in shortest supply, the thing that cannot be manufactured or delegated away.
The next generation, he believes, has grown up with technology, including artificial intelligence. They have the opportunity to find the balance between incorporating these tools and maintaining the human touch. It is a delicate equilibrium, one that requires constant attention. Technology can connect Friot to patients across the country, but it cannot replace what happens in that connection: the listening, the noticing, the advocacy.
From that thirteen-year-old in a New York nursing home to the founder of AgeWell Advocacy, there is a thread of consistency. Friot has spent his professional life in the company of people whom society often renders invisible. The elderly. The cognitively impaired. Those without advocates. He has made it his business to see them, to ensure they are not merely maintained but accompanied.
This is not work that comes with obvious rewards. It does not generate headlines or build fortunes. But it generates something else: the knowledge that when people are at their most vulnerable, someone is in their corner. That basic needs are met. That dignity is preserved. That human touch has not been entirely automated away.
Friot's grandmother Donna would be proud of what her grandson has built. What he has built is love, structured into a practice and sustained over decades. It is the decision, made again and again, to go above the job description because you truly care. It is, in the end, a life well spent in the service of lives well lived, even in their final chapters.
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