About the Vigilant Advocate
A year lost. A life changed.
Kristen Angus Best founded the Vigilant Advocate after she experienced the complexity of navigating healthcare for two of her children. In 2017, her then eleven-year-old son missed a year of school sick with a debilitating illness that no one could identify. Navigating care with out a diagnosis presented a myriad of problems. In the same year, her then ten-year-old daughter was diagnosed with juvenile-idiopathic-arthritis, a chronic condition.
Despite a lot of privileges, the difficulty of navigating care was overwhelming.
Kristen was a lawyer. Their family had health insurance. She didn’t work that year so she had time, the endless hours, needed to find answers. They knew doctors, they had resources, they lived in a place with lots of healthcare. Despite all of that, they barely saw their way through that year. Kristen experienced the difficulty of navigating a system she did not understand, advocating for her children in a system that did not want to hear from her, and trying, simply, to keep it all together all the while. Eventually, an answer was found for Kristen’s son: he had a serious allergy to indoor mold and, unfortunately, that specific mold was invisibly blooming in their home. And, for her daughter, they learned to settle into what life with a chronic disease would mean. By persistence, circumstance, and luck, both kids are now in college and healthy.
A commitment to change the system.
After these experiences, Kristen became committed to improving the system. Her first step was to go back to school. She earned a Master of Social Work from Columbia University to build out her skill set and understand the system of how caregivers can be supported while they navigate care. Since then, she has been building the Vigilant Advocate while supporting caregivers navigating care in all sorts of circumstances such as advocating for families who children miss a lot of school due to illness, supporting adult children caring for their aging parents, and when being there for families when they are living with the uncertainty of what they might be facing.
Kristen Angus Best, JD, MSW
Founder and Principal
202-460-1256
