How to earn an evidence label
Evidence labels on Chosen Years are not for sale, and no plan includes one. That is the whole point of them: a family reading your listing needs to know that the label came from somewhere other than your marketing department, and from somewhere other than your invoice to us.
Which leaves a fair question. If you cannot buy one, how do you get one? Here are the four routes, in rough order of how much they cost you and how much weight they carry.
Route one
Get your staff trained by SAGECare
SAGECare is SAGE's training arm and the closest thing this field has to a recognised credential. Since it was revamped in 2023 there are two levels, and the old bronze, silver and gold tiers no longer exist.
- SAGECare Credential. Half your management and half your staff complete a one-hour SAGECare course.
- SAGECare Platinum. Eighty percent of management complete the management course and eighty percent of staff complete the one-hour course.
Training runs in person, by webinar or on demand. SAGECare does not publish a price, so ask them for a quote rather than budgeting from anything you read elsewhere.
What it proves: that a stated share of your people sat through the training on a given date. What it does not prove: that the training stuck, or that the person on shift tonight was one of them. We publish the date next to the badge for exactly that reason, and we would rather you tell families the same thing.
Route two
Take part in the Long-Term Care Equality Index
The LEI is run jointly by SAGE and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, and it is the only benchmark that looks at your policies rather than your training records. It is for residential long-term care and senior housing communities.
It starts with the Commitment to Caring pledge, signed by your leadership. From there you complete a self-assessment against four areas: nondiscrimination and visiting policies, resident services and support, employee benefits and policies, and resident and community engagement. The survey runs every two years; the 2025 report was the most recent, and 274 communities across 33 states had pledged by the time it was published.
Read this part twice. The pledge is not a score, and signing it does not earn an LEI badge on your listing. The badges here reflect a scored result in a published index year. Pledging is still worth doing and we are happy to note it, but we will not present it as something it is not.
Route three
Publish your own policies, in public
This is the route almost nobody takes and the one we wish everybody would. Put your nondiscrimination policy on your website, in full, with sexual orientation and gender identity named in it. Do the same for your visiting policy, and say plainly who counts as family. If you have a chosen-family policy, publish it. If a resident's partner can share a room at every level of care you offer, write that down where a stranger can read it at eleven at night.
A page on your own site that a family can read without phoning you is a public document, and a public document is something we can cite. That earns a documented label, which sits above provider-confirmed precisely because we did not have to take your word for it.
It costs nothing except the afternoon it takes to decide what your policy actually is. Several of the organizations in this directory that carry the strongest labels are small nonprofits that simply wrote theirs down.
Route four
Tell us what is already true
Some of what we have not recorded about you is not missing, it is just not written anywhere we could find. If you run an LGBTQIA+ residents' group, if your intake form has asked for pronouns and a chosen name for years, if a member of staff has been quietly doing this work since before it had a name, tell us.
We will record it as provider-confirmed, labeled as your account of your own practice, with the date. It is the lightest label we publish, and it is still better than a blank, because a family reading a blank assumes the worst.
Common questions
Can we pay for an evidence label?
No. Plans buy placement and presentation on your listing. Evidence is assigned editorially, from a source we can check, and a Free listing and a Featured listing are held to exactly the same standard. There is no version of this where money moves a label.
We signed the Commitment to Caring pledge. Do we get a badge?
Not by itself. The pledge is a statement of intent and the first step into the Long-Term Care Equality Index, not a score. The LEI badges on this site reflect a scored result in a published index year. We are glad to note that you have pledged, and it is a real signal, but it is not the same thing and we will not label it as though it were.
Our staff training is in-house rather than SAGECare. Does that count?
It counts for something, but not as a credential, because there is no third party we can check it against. Send us what you have and we will record it as provider-confirmed, which is labeled honestly as your account of your own practice.
How long does a label last?
Credentials are point-in-time. They carry the date they were earned, and staff turn over afterwards, so we publish the date alongside the label and re-check it. If yours lapses we will say so rather than quietly leaving it up.
We are a small organization with no budget for any of this.
Then start with the last route on this page. Publishing your own nondiscrimination policy, visiting policy and chosen-family policy costs nothing but the afternoon it takes to write them down, and it is the single most useful thing a small provider can do. Some of the most genuinely affirming organizations in this directory have no credential at all.
Whichever route you take, send us the source and the date. A label without one is a rumour, and we do not publish those. How verification works sets out what each label does and does not prove.