Welcome to the Care Guild, a first-of-its-kind list of the people doing the most to reimagine and rehumanize our care system. You’ll find everyone from policy renegades to direct service providers, from tech entrepreneurs to documentary filmmakers.

While these dynamic leaders all tackle the problems and opportunities of care in this country in vastly different ways, they share a common ethos: that care is fundamental to our collective thriving, and must be honored as such.

This list is updated by The Holding Co., a lab to redesign care for the 21st century, with lots of input from our fantastic friends and collaborators. We add new chapters of honorees within particular themes. In this way, the list is constantly evolving and growing, with a special eye on what is most cutting edge in care right now.

It seems we might be finally thinking and talking about care in this country, not as a personal juggle, but as broken and fixable infrastructure—as fundamental as our highways and bridges. Real money is being put behind this grand recentering of care via federal policy, but also with private investment. Venture capitalists, start-up entrepreneurs, and corporations have never been so intrigued by how care is both an underexplored market and a wise retention strategy.

So how are we going to make the most impact on the most lives in this unprecedented time? How are we going to redesign existing systems and build elegant new ones? That’s what we were made for at The Holding Co. Now’s our time.

This list weaves together and celebrates the dynamic people advancing the broader care system (which we all too often think of in silos). Our hope is that the list makes these folks feel honored, but also that it helps people see and be seen by new collaborators and supporters, and that it ushers in a new era of creativity and recognition for care across the country.

This was our criteria:

Re-imagining the field
Anti-racist and anti-sexist
Human-centered
Silo-busting
Expectation-raising
Unapologetically joyful
Imaginative
Solving real problems for real people