Helping professionals better understand the complexities that arise when aging, cognition, care needs and family relationships intersect.
Amy Friesen is a Family Dynamics & Aging Specialist, speaker, author, and educator with more than 20 years of experience in aging and eldercare.
As the founder of Tea & Toast and Eldercare Planners of Canada, Amy has spent her career inside the real-world complexities of aging, working with families, professionals, and organizations through decisions involving care, cognition, senior living, long-term care, and complicated family relationships.
That experience gives Amy a perspective that goes beyond policies, processes, and textbook scenarios. Her work examines what happens when cognition, capacity, family dynamics, decision-making, and care needs intersect and what professionals need to recognize when those complexities show up in their work.
Amy delivers keynotes, workshops and professional education for organizations, associations and conferences. Known for making complicated subjects approachable and practical, she gives audiences frameworks, context, and tools they can apply to the situations they encounter in the real world.
Sessions can be delivered as keynotes, workshops, professional development sessions or customized training. Amy's speaking and training focuses on two core areas, with each presentation customized to the audience, industry and learning objectives.
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How family relationships and history intersect with aging, cognition, and care.
Topics can include family roles and conflict, dementia and cognitive change, decision-making and capacity, elder abuse and vulnerability, boundaries, estrangement, caregiving expectations, and difficult family conversations.
Helping people understand and prepare for the decisions that come with aging.
Topics can include changing care needs, aging at home, retirement living, long-term care, caregiver capacity, planning conversations, and recognizing when a current care plan may no longer be sustainable.
"Our office brought in Amy Friesen from Tea & Toast for workshops with our employees. Amy was very informative and well-received by the group, and she impressed us with how engaging she made the nitty-gritty details of what could be a dull part of eldercare information (the acronyms and governing bodies to be aware of). We also really appreciated her workbooks as a way to walkthrough and prepared for conversations about eldercare. Thank you Amy!"
Great-- empathetic but realistic, clear, and she was able to give concrete recommendations on the spot in response to participant questions.
Amy brings an extraordinary blend of lived experience, emotional intelligence, and practical wisdom to conversations about caregiving and resilience. With 20 years in eldercare and 11 years building Tea & Toast, she has helped families navigate some of life’s most emotionally complex decisions with more clarity and confidence. What makes her perspective especially powerful is how openly she connects her professional work with her own story growing up in a traumatic environment, living with dyslexia, and redefining what safe caregiving and family can look like. Listeners will gain grounded insight into boundaries, aging, neurodiversity, and the emotional realities of supporting others without losing themselves in the process.
Some guests arrive prepared. Amy Friesen arrived present. What struck me most about our conversation wasn't the depth of her expertise — though after twenty years inside the eldercare industry, that's considerable. It was her willingness to sit with the harder layers of the work: the family wounds that surface when a parent declines, the generational stories that quietly steer decisions families think they're making rationally, the emotional cost no one names until they've already paid it. Amy doesn't speak in slogans. She speaks in observation — earned the long way, through real families and real conversations. Her trauma-informed lens is not a credential she wears. It's how she actually listens. If you're considering Amy as a guest, here's what you'll get: a conversation that holds weight without becoming heavy, candor without performance, and the rare quality of a guest who makes the host better simply by being entirely herself. She is the kind of voice this work needs more of.
THANK YOU Amy!! Your presentation was wonderful and I have received such positive feedback from so many of the participants. I anticipate that your clientele will expand over time based on the attendees comments and heartfelt appreciation.
