About Us

Jolie holds a degree in psychology, and worked as a Peer Support Specialist in a mental health agency — sitting with people through their hardest moments, without judgment and without an agenda. She’s a trained caregiver herself. She has also studied fiduciary work, which means she can talk with a family’s elder law attorney or CPA in their own terms.

My grandmother was the one who held our family together. We traveled the world together, and she taught me how to laugh at myself.

It started with mild forgetfulness that seemed like nothing. Then one afternoon she calmly asked if I could see “the man in the corner of the room.” After a fall and hip surgery she couldn’t do physical therapy, and my grandparents’ doorways were too narrow for a wheelchair. Within a week she was living in a facility, among strangers.

I kept visiting, with my young daughters. Eventually she stopped remembering my name — but true to her Southern roots, she’d still greet me with a warm smile and gently ask who I was.

Today, four more people in my family are in the early stages of dementia. Staying at home, with dignity, among people who know them, is what I wanted for her — and it’s what we want for your family.

Before Live & Thrive, David spent sixteen years running an executive recruiting firm, placing people in sensitive roles in healthcare and finance — the same judgment he now brings to hiring caregivers. He later worked as a licensed insurance agent, helping families plan for long-term care. And he trained as a caregiver himself, so he knows the work first-hand, and is working through dementia and memory care coursework.

My mother was the caregiver for my father, a doctor in rural Michigan — for years, the only doctor in the county. She kept everything about his condition quiet. I didn’t understand how far things had progressed until I asked him to help me move across the country, so we could spend some time together. I remember sitting in the moving truck, listening to him ask the same question again and again, and the quiet tears falling as I answered each one — wondering why my mother had never told me.

I didn’t know what stage he was in, or what would happen next, or how fast. I didn’t even know what questions to ask a doctor — and my own father was one.