Bay Area startup finds college students to help older adults at home
JoeyCo offers an answer to both the housing crisis and the caregiver shortage
There’s a shortage of affordable housing in the U.S. and also a shortage of qualified caregivers for older people who need a bit of help with everyday chores.
You don’t normally connect the two but Alison Donnally did. After some tragedies affected her family members, Donnally hit upon the idea of finding college students who needed affordable housing and were willing to provide a helping hand along the way.
She began developing the idea and launched the service in the San Francisco Bay Area. In one of her first pairings, she placed a Dominican University basketball player, Nanik, with Paige, a Marin County woman with early-stage dementia.
Nanik moved into a spare room in Paige’s home, where his duties included walking the dog, sorting the mail, making lunch, and taking out the trash. In exchange, he pays $1,700 a month for a room in Marin County — one of the most expensive places to live in the country — and earns back about $500 of that for the hours he works. Paige’s husband Robert, who is her full-time caregiver while also running a company, no longer worries about leaving her home alone.
The arrangement is the product of JoeyCo, Donnally’s Bay Area startup. It’s betting it can solve two of the region’s most stubborn problems with a single platform: a shortage of affordable housing for college students and a growing need for in-home support among older adults who aren’t yet ready for formal caregiving.
“It just didn’t make sense to me why we couldn’t have something similar to an au pair, but for older adults,” Donnally said in a recent SFChron story.
A specialized matching app
The model is deceptively simple. JoeyCo uses a matchmaking app to connect homeowners with spare bedrooms to college students willing to trade light household help for reduced rent. With roughly 60 percent of U.S. homes containing at least one unused bedroom, Donnally sees the inventory as hiding in plain sight.
Because of employment regulations, the financial arrangement works on a reimbursement basis: students pay full rent upfront and are paid back for their hours, a structure designed to stay compliant with labor law.
Nanik, whose options in the Bay Area rental market were limited before he found JoeyCo, says the work doesn’t feel transactional. “It doesn’t feel like a chore to lend a helping hand,” he said.
For the Millers, the match has provided something harder to quantify. Robert’s initial concern wasn’t logistics — it was whether his wife would be comfortable. “My worry actually was Paige,” he said. “Would she feel comfortable having somebody else live in the house?”
She was.
The arrangement speaks to a gap that professional home care agencies and assisted living facilities don’t easily fill. Many older adults with early-stage cognitive or mobility challenges don’t need — or want — a formal caregiver. What they often need is presence: someone to help with the small daily tasks that enable independence, without the clinical formality or significant expense of home health aides.
JoeyCo’s pitch to both sides is essentially the same: this can work for you.
For students, the appeal is obvious in a region where a single bedroom in Marin County routinely tops $2,000 a month and commuting from further-flung areas can add hours to an already demanding schedule. For older homeowners, the pitch is subtler but potentially more valuable — a vetted, background-checked housemate whose presence provides both practical help and social connection, two things that research consistently links to better outcomes for people aging in place.
A good fit
The startup enters a space that larger platforms have largely ignored. Existing home-sharing programs for seniors tend to be small and locally run, often through nonprofits, without the technological infrastructure or growth ambitions of a venture-backed company.