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When a family caregiver broke down in tears while checking her loved one into VON's overnight respite program, Crystal Titus knew exactly what to do. She offered a tissue and a kind word, assuming the woman was overwhelmed by grief.

"But that's not why I'm crying," the caregiver told her. "I'm crying because I'm relieved. You listened. You just let me talk."

Crystal, a certified personal support worker (PSW) at VON's Hamilton, Ontario Adult Day Program, has heard that kind of relief before. She has also felt it herself.

For more than a decade, Crystal has helped seniors and people with disabilities find purpose and joy in a safe, supervised setting — while giving their family caregivers a chance to breathe. The Adult Day Program is one of VON's core offerings, providing social, recreational and therapeutic activities that help people stay in their own homes and communities. It is work Crystal describes simply: "You have to have a heart, and you have to want to make a difference in other people's lives."

She knows the value of that difference from the inside.

In 2020, while visiting her father during his dialysis treatments, Crystal noticed her mother repeatedly asking the same question. A nurse would answer, someone new would enter the room, and her mother would ask again. Crystal recognized the signs, had her mother assessed, and that year her mom was diagnosed with dementia.

What followed was a stretch that many family caregivers will recognize. Her father was in renal failure, later heart failure, needing dialysis three times a week. Her mother needed constant supervision. And Crystal was working full time.

So, she turned to the services she knew. Her mother enrolled in VON's Adult Day Program on the days her father had dialysis. Crystal even arranged the logistics so that her father would be picked up from treatment, her mother would be collected from the program, and both would be driven safely home together.

When her father was hospitalized in August 2023, and Crystal was, in her words, "utterly exhausted," she asked the doctors to keep him an extra week. That weekend, her mother stayed at VON's overnight respite program for the first time.

Her mother is now in long-term care, but she still talks about it. "She'll say, 'Oh, I was at the VON program today,'" Crystal said. "That meant a lot to her."

That lived experience is why Crystal understands the caregiver who cried from relief. She has been that caregiver. It is also why she believes so deeply in what the Adult Day Program does — not only for clients, but for the families and communities around them."Our role here isn't just about the client. It's also about the caregiver. It's about the entire community, really," she said.

Crystal came to VON in 2014, hired as a respite worker on the condition that she return to school for her PSW certification. She did — in her 40s, graduating with honours and earning her college's faculty award for health care. Twelve years later, she has no plans to leave.

The rewards, she says, run both ways. On a hard day, a client will offer a hug or say just the right thing. Recently, she coaxed a reluctant client into joining an exercise by asking for help counting the repetitions. "She's the one giving now," Crystal said. "She feels like she's got a purpose for being here."

For Crystal, that is the heart of the work and the reason she keeps coming back.

"You plant both feet on the floor, and you know that you're doing good," she said. "Knowing that you're making a difference helps you keep going."