Making the hidden costs of care visible
When evaluating a project, we usually focus on what can be easily measured: budgets, activities, outputs, and impact indicators.
But what about the hidden costs of care?
Who looks after a field worker’s child while they spend days away from home? Who supports an activist’s aging parent while they are responding to a disaster? When a project team pushes through an intense period of work, where are the postponed health needs, emotional burdens, and risks of burnout documented?
Most of the time, they are not documented anywhere.
At İhtimam, we developed the Shadow Care Analyst to help make these invisible dimensions visible.
The tool is based on our Shadow Care Chains framework. Inspired by the literature on global care chains, this approach argues that care never disappears—it is simply shifted elsewhere. When care responsibilities are reduced in one place, they are often transferred to another person, household, or community, where they become less visible.
This dynamic is especially common in civil society organizations, humanitarian responses, and social change initiatives. Even organizations working for care justice can unintentionally overlook the care costs borne by their own teams. Efforts to meet the needs of others may rely on staff and volunteers postponing their own care needs.
The Shadow Care Analyst helps organizations identify these hidden costs.
Organizations can upload project documents, work plans, or budgets and receive an assessment through a care lens. The tool examines how care responsibilities are distributed, identifies areas where care-related risks remain invisible, highlights practices that may contribute to burnout, and points out where care costs are not being considered in project design or budgeting.
Our goal is not to judge organizations.
Our goal is to prevent care from remaining an invisible economy of sacrifice.
We believe that care should be recognized not only in outcomes, but also in processes. The costs of care must become a legitimate part of project design, budgeting, and organizational culture.
The Shadow Care Analyst is one of the tools we have developed to support more just, sustainable, and care-centered ways of working.
