worker exploitation, and a lack of meaningful career ladders. (15) Stabilizing, growing, and supporting the direct care professional workforce across the continuum of long-term care is essential to ensuring a strong, qualified pipeline of workers, and improving the lives of direct care professionals and the older individuals, people with disabilities, and the families and communities that they support. (b) Purposes The purposes of this Act are as follows: (1) To increase the capacity of the direct care professional workforce to ensure that older individuals, people with disabilities, and their families receive the services they need in the settings of their choice as they deserve to live healthy, independent lives. (2) To increase compensation so that direct care professionals are paid a living wage and have access to essential job benefits, and so that direct care professional jobs are good jobs. (3) To ensure that direct care professionals are treated with respect, provided with a safe working environment, protected from exploitation, and fairly compensated for the skilled work they do. (4) To improve access to and quality of long-term care, including collecting meaningful and actionable data on the direct care professional workforce and the people they support. (5) To eliminate the race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and gender identity disparities that exist across the direct care professional workforce. (6) To strengthen the direct care professional workforce in order to support the 53,000,000 unpaid family caregivers who are often providing complex services and supports to their loved ones who are older individuals and people with disabilities in their homes, communities, and residential settings. 3. Definitions In this Act: (1) Activities of daily living The term activities of daily living means basic, personal, everyday activities, including tasks such as eating, toileting, grooming, dressing, bathing, and transferring. (2) Aging and disability resource center The term Aging and Disability Resource