Empower Your Caregiving Journey Today!
Discover personalized support and resources tailored for family caregivers navigating Alzheimer’s and dementia. Join us to honor your family’s unique story and ensure compassionate care.
Angelica Herrera-Venson, DrPH, MPH
Gerontologist | Care Navigator | Dementia Care Practitioner | End-of-Life Doula
Hello and Welcome! I am a gerontologist, aging and dementia care specialist, and public health researcher with over 25 years of experience in the non-profit sector. I have been supporting family caregivers with navigating complex health systems, difficult emotions, and life transitions.
Alongside my professional training, my perspective has also been shaped by my family’s personal experience caring for my father, who lived with Alzheimer’s disease for many years. This experience deepened my understanding of the practical and emotional realities families face.
As a certified Dementia Care Practitioner, End-of-Life Doula (through INELDA), and Five Wishes Facilitator, I provide direct services such as caregiver coaching, advanced care planning, and provide referrals to trusted partners in health and social services in the East Valley (Chandler, Gilbert, Queen Creek, Mesa, & Tempe), in Arizona. My approach honors each family’s unique story, ensuring care feels aligned with their spiritual and cultural traditions.
I am a former Geriatric Psychiatry Fellow (at UCSD, through NIH/NIMH) and a Health and Aging Policy Fellow in Washington, D.C., a program run by the Hartford Foundation and Columbia University. In my early years as an academic researcher, I published numerous peer-reviewed studies on chronic disease management, cognitive health, and family caregiving. For the past 11 years, I have directed national data management and evaluation projects at the National Council on Aging (NCOA) focused on chronic disease management and healthy aging. I established and operated my blog, ‘Kapok Aging & Caregiver Resources,’ from 2014 to the present at multiculturalcaregiving.com.
At Kapok Life Care, I developed the Kapok Model of Conscious Care™ to guide the way I coach and support family caregivers, with everything from the deeply personal to the practical. Across eight key pillars, I work with individuals to thoughtfully review nervous system regulation for stressed caregivers, life planning, care navigation, dementia-specific skills and guidance, pain management, education, home environment safety, and end-of-life preparation.
My work is devoted to supporting family caregivers so they feel informed, organized, and steady as they care for a loved one living with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.