What if the answer to aging well at home isn’t an expensive caregiver — but a college student in the spare bedroom? In this episode, host Kirsten Howe sits down with Alison Donnally, founder of JoeyCo and a healthcare innovation veteran of Amazon Care and Kaiser Permanente. After three of her own family members experienced major health events while aging alone, Alison asked a question that wouldn’t let go: if the au pair system gives American families relatively affordable live-in childcare, why isn’t there an equivalent for older adults? Her answer is JoeyCo, which matches older adult homeowners (“hosts”) with screened, vetted local students (“Joeys”) who rent a room in the home and work for the household — groceries, dog walks, trash cans, and the everyday help that keeps life running.
Together, Kirsten and Alison break down what makes these arrangements actually work: the legal structure behind every match in California, the clear expectations set before anyone moves in, and the simple communication habits that keep small issues from ever turning into big ones. They also explore the deeper reason this model resonates: as we age, our world tends to get smaller. A little help — and a little company — can push it back open.
Time-stamped Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
0:30 Kirsten’s focus for this episode series: not living longer, but living better — all the way to the end.
1:05 Meet Alison Donnally, founder of JoeyCo, with a background spanning Amazon Care, Kaiser Permanente, the NFL, Tuck, and Wharton.
1:40 The concept in a nutshell: older adult “hosts” get affordable help at home, and student “Joeys” get a place to live and a job.
2:42 Alison shares the personal inspiration — three family members, aging alone for very different reasons, each experienced a major health event.
3:25 “These are not healthcare things that are happening to my family members, until it is something that is healthcare.”
3:50 The aha moment came from the au pair system: why not affordable live-in support for older adults, too?
4:52 How it works in California: lodging agreements, household employment rules, and keeping the complexity on JoeyCo’s side.
6:45 Who becomes a host? Often women aging alone with an extra bedroom and a desire to help solve the housing crisis.
7:30 Another common host: a household where a family member is the caregiver for someone with dementia or a chronic condition.
8:05 Every match starts with one question: what would make this host come alive?
8:47 Kirsten’s theater-line story — Joeys aren’t caregivers, but getting to a play matters, too.
9:45 Even chit-chat in line adds vibrancy to a life that can start to feel smaller with age.
10:21 “One by one, we lose our friends.” Why JoeyCo is more than a business transaction.
11:42 Did you know? A room-for-chores swap isn’t legally compliant in California — every match takes two agreements: monthly rent from Joey to host, and biweekly W-2 payroll from host to Joey.
12:56 The house manual covers the roommate stuff up front: Wi-Fi passwords, fridge shelves, and clear expectations.
13:30 Weekly look-ahead meetings keep payroll accurate and schedules in sync — flexibility requires communication.
13:55 The bathroom fan story: handling the little things before they become big things.
Get in touch with Alison!
Alison Donnally
JoeyCo
https://www.withjoey.com/blog/welcome-to-joey-co
alison@withjoey.com
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Absolute Trust Talk. I’m Kirsten Howe, the managing attorney at Absolute Trust Counsel, and I’m very glad you’re here today. I’m working on some episodes lately that focus on things we need to know about, or things we can do, that can help us live our best life all the way to the end. I’m not a doctor, and this is not a medical show, so we’re not going to focus much on how to live longer. On this show, we’re more interested in how to live better.
Of course, living longer is usually a good thing, but it can also be problematic for people who don’t have enough of a support network as they age. Today, we’re going to be talking to someone who has created something that I think is just an ingenious way of helping people get the support they need as they age.
My guest is Alison Donnally, and she has a very impressive and very relevant background for what she’s up to today. She’s led teams at the forefront of healthcare innovation at Amazon Care and Kaiser Permanente. She started her career in media and technology at the NFL, and she has an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a BS from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Very impressive credentials.
The reason she’s here today is to talk about her current project. She is the founder of JoeyCo, a company that matches older adult homeowners — they’re called hosts — who need affordable help here and there with students. The students are called Joeys, and they need a place to live and employment. Alison’s vision is that aging adults will be happier and healthier if they can stay at home with a bit of help, without spending all their hard-earned money on caregivers. The caregivers in the family are less stressed because they’re not doing everything. And on the flip side, the Joey gets through school and comes out with maybe a little less student debt. It’s just a great thing all the way around. I really love this idea. Alison, welcome. I’m so very thrilled to have you here today.
Thanks so much for having me, Kirsten. It’s great to be here.
Good. Well, let’s start at the beginning. What was the inspiration, personally, for you to get this project going?
Like so many of us — and especially those of us in the sandwich generation — I had older adult family members who were aging alone and experiencing bad outcomes. My grandmother was aging alone during COVID. My uncle was choosing a woodsy retirement — he was hunting and fishing. My godmother, who is also my aunt, was aging alone and had a vibrant social life and community, but was living by herself. And each of them, for very different reasons, experienced very bad outcomes aging alone. Each of them had a major health event, and this experience personally just kept highlighting — as you noted, I was in healthcare at the time — that we weren’t seeing this in our healthcare offices. These are not healthcare things that are happening to my family members, until it is something that is healthcare. I wanted to do something that changed the outcome for other family members, for other people, before it was a health event.
At the time I was having this personal experience with my older adult family members, I was also a new mom. Like I said, I’m in the sandwich generation — I have very small kids: a two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a six-year-old at this point. And I was relearning about the au pair system, which is a relatively affordable childcare option for American families, enabled by the visa system. It didn’t really make sense to me why we couldn’t have live-in, relatively affordable support for older adults like we have for children. That was really the nugget — the aha — that led me to developing JoeyCo. And that’s why we’re here chit-chatting today.
I think that’s just fantastic. I found Alison by reading an article about her company in the San Francisco Chronicle, and I thought, this is just such a great idea. I immediately sent her an email and asked her to come on my show. Walk us through how it works. I gave a little overview of the concept, but walk us through how the whole thing really works.
Absolutely. I alluded to the au pair system, and my initial hope was that we could model JoeyCo very similarly, because that’s a federal government visa system — it actually sits outside a lot of the other regulations that we at JoeyCo need to navigate and manage. Part of what we help hosts set up, in the state of California, are what are typically lodging agreements, not full rental agreements. It’s an owner-occupied home, and the room being rented comes with a shared kitchen, so they’re more like lodging agreements. In any case, there are all sorts of complexities to renting space in your home in California, and all sorts of complexities to employing a household employee and what that actually looks like here.
From a how-it-works perspective, there was a long journey for me as a founder to really dig into that regulatory complexity. I always like to say it can be complex for us, but it always needs to be easy for our clients, because you’re inviting someone into your home, and you want to make sure that you’re protected and that you really understand what you’re signing up for. A lot of what we do as a service is help our hosts understand what this looks like for them. We love talking with other folks who are part of their support system. We’re not attorneys, we’re not CPAs, we’re not private wealth managers — we aren’t professional services — but we know quite a bit about how this fits within someone’s financial plans and how it shows up within their personal finances. We’re always happy to chat with folks like you, or others who are part of the support system of our hosts, to make sure this lands in the right place for them and their household.
How does it typically start for you? Does a host come to you looking to find a Joey, or does the Joey come to you?
It depends — it could be either one, but it typically starts with a host. We work very closely with a couple of different host profiles, and I’ll give you some examples of folks it might be good for. We work with a lot of people — typically women, although it can be men as well — who are aging alone and have this deep altruism. They’re saying, “I don’t know what to do about the macro environment. There’s a lot of noise in politics right now, and a lot of stuff I can’t control. But I know there’s a housing crisis in my community, and I have an extra bedroom. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get my dog walked and the trash cans taken out while providing housing to a student?” There’s a real, deep altruism in a lot of our hosts — they want to be part of the solution to the housing crisis we’re facing in California.
Another good example is a household where a spouse or child is the caregiver for someone with a diagnosis. That diagnosis is often dementia of some variety, but not always — it could be diabetes or another chronic health condition that requires more support and assistance from a family caregiver. Our students aren’t trained health aides or anything like that, but there’s all sorts of life that still needs to happen. Groceries still need to get picked up, meals still need to get made, trash still needs to go out.
Once hosts come to us, we really work to understand what would make them come alive. How would their life get better with a Joey and an extra set of hands? Once we have those parameters, we design the search — and each search is custom to the household and to the host. We have plenty of Joeys that we screen and vet all the time, and we keep an ongoing roster, but each time we also do a really custom search, because every household is different. Every household is unique. That’s the joy of what we do: I get to go into people’s homes, ask them what makes them come alive, and help them find and achieve that. That’s the privilege and the joy of this work — everyone is a special snowflake, and we love our special snowflakes, because that’s what we all deserve: to be treated individually and distinctly.
Yes. There are all kinds of things here. The Joeys are not caregivers, as you pointed out. They are not helping people be fed, they are not transferring people, they’re not helping with toileting — the typical ADLs that we talk about. But I was at a play over the weekend, standing in line behind an older person who was obviously with a much younger person. It could have been a grandchild, but we struck up a conversation, and no — it wasn’t a Joey situation, but it was that kind of thing. It was a more distant kind of friend saying, “I bet this person would really like to be able to go to a play, but couldn’t without help.” It was just a lovely thing to see, and I think that’s exactly the kind of thing you’re talking about. Household chores, yes — but there’s more to it, even than that.
Absolutely — you’re spot on that those social connections matter, and it doesn’t even have to be deep friendships or ongoing social relationships. Going to a play and chit-chatting with someone in line — there’s so much vibrancy to life that starts to feel smaller sometimes as we age. Giving yourself space to see your world expand — and plays are wonderful for storytelling and new ideas — just like you were saying, it’s really wonderful to be able to enable that expansion in life, as opposed to feeling like it’s getting smaller all the time.
I think that is a serious problem for a lot of people: their world does get smaller as they become less physically able to do things, and their peer group gradually goes away — one by one, we lose our friends. That’s one of the things I like so much about your idea. It’s more than just “I need a job; you have a job.” It’s more than just a business transaction. There are wins on both sides of the equation that go way beyond the business transaction. It’s just — I mean, the word is beautiful. That’s the word.
Thank you. I agree.
I’m sure you do, but it’s just lovely. Now — because I’m a lawyer, I have to get down into the details. Let me back up. The Joey is getting a place to live — a room in a house. But I’m guessing that sometimes there’s additional compensation beyond that. Or is that the entire compensation?
In California, there are only certain deductions you can make to minimum wage and still be compliant for lodging, so we actually set up two distinct agreements: the housing license — the lodging agreement, in most cases — and the employment offer letter. There’s a rental payment on the first of the month — let’s say it’s $1,000 — and that $1,000 goes from the Joey to the host at the beginning of the month. Then, per California employment regulations, the Joey is a W-2 employee of the household. We help the host set up with a payroll service provider, and they pay the Joey biweekly, per California law.
Okay. And you’ve got that all dialed in — you can help them figure out what that needs to look like and get it done for them. Do you also walk them through the expectations? This is what you’re not requiring — the Joey isn’t available 24/7, and there are limits on the kinds of tasks you’d be expecting. You facilitate that agreement between them?
Absolutely. I just covered the two core legal agreements that get signed. We also have what we call our house manual, and that covers all the more roommate-type things that need to get talked through. We’re big believers in clear communication up front, and in building consistent, clear communication throughout. The house manual includes everything from the Wi-Fi password to how we’re going to share the fridge. Is anything fair game? Are we going to do a shelf system? These are things we’d love to talk through before they become issues.
On an ongoing basis, we have what we call our weekly look-ahead meeting. We ask both hosts and Joeys to have a weekly meeting — not only to confirm, “Yes, I worked ten hours last week; let’s make sure that gets into payroll,” but also to look ahead at the schedule. Flexibility requires communication. To your point, the Joey is not on call all the time, but let’s make sure their class schedule doesn’t conflict with your bridge game, or whatever the needs are for the week. That way we’re building in a system of communication for small conflicts.
I’ll give you an example. One of our hosts didn’t realize how loud the guest bathroom fan was, and we really needed to address it: “That guest bathroom fan — I need you to turn it off after you’re done showering, because it’s very loud and it rattles my bedroom.” It’s things like that we want to make sure we’re talking about — “Hey, let’s turn off the bathroom fan,” or “Let’s not use the blender super early in the morning” — whatever those small things are, before it becomes, “Oh my gosh, I really need to get this person out of my house.” That’s a big part of our process, too: building that habit and that communication on the little things so they don’t become big things.
Right — because everybody wants it to work very much.
Exactly. Everyone’s bought in.
It’s a lot easier to make something that exists work than to start all over again.
Exactly — when you can.
Resources Related to This Episode:
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- Get our free introductory guide to the most used estate planning tool, family trusts, and understand how we plan to help protect your family. Guidebook #3: https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/guidebooks/
- Absolute Trust Counsel would love to offer access to our Incapacity Planning resource page: https://AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com/Incapacity-Planning/. We’ve collected our top planning information all in one place so listeners can find videos, guidebooks, blog posts, and a host of information with tips and strategies on implementing, planning, and protecting themselves and their loved ones.
- We’re pleased to provide a library of e-books to address common estate planning questions and concerns in practical, easy-to-understand language. https://AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com/Resources/.
- ASK KIRSTEN: If you’d like Kirsten to answer your question on the air, please email her at Info@AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com.
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