This is Cruz.
Nineteen years old. Mostly non-speaking. Full of beans. The reason Cruz Care exists.
— From Nick (Cruz’s dad) & Jess Wisniewski, co-founders
If you can keep up, he’ll let you in.
Cruz is 19. He has level 3 autism and ADHD. He has words — specific ones, for specific things — but not for every moment, and not for every feeling. Anyone who’s spent five minutes with him knows there’s nothing quiet about Cruz. He has a big, bright, busy personality. He’s happy. He’s loud in all the best ways.
He loves swimming. He loves the beach. He loves hiking, and bouncing, and basically any activity that lets him move — because Cruz has more energy than most of us know what to do with. Sit-still days are not Cruz days.
And he loves people. His family. The support workers who really see him. The ones who know that when he holds your hand and pulls you toward the door, the day’s plans have officially changed.
And when the world won’t slow down to listen.
Cruz has words. Specific ones, for specific things — the people he loves, the things he wants. But not for every situation. When he can’t ask why a routine has changed, or tell us that a room is too loud, or explain that something just feels wrong — frustration builds. Fast.
For Cruz, that frustration sometimes spills over. He can become heightened. He can become physically aggressive when he can’t communicate what he wants, or when something he was promised doesn’t come. It’s been hard. At home, in public, in spaces built for quiet — it’s been really hard. We’re not going to pretend otherwise.
But “challenging behaviour” is a phrase we don’t love. What we’ve learned, slowly and the hard way, is that Cruz isn’t trying to be difficult — he’s trying to be understood. Every good shift, every good hour, every routine that lands right is a small act of translation between Cruz and a world that wasn’t really built for him.
That’s why the people who care for him matter so much. The wrong worker turns a tough moment into a crisis. The right one turns it into a moment Cruz comes back from in five minutes, smiling.
We didn’t plan to start a care company.
We set out to get Cruz the right care — and kept hitting the same walls.
Provider after provider promised the world and delivered staff turnover, missed shifts, and the kind of paperwork that makes your head spin. Plans changed without warning. Funding got pulled. Workers came and went before they ever really knew Cruz. Sometimes he was simply “too much” for a roster that wasn’t built for someone like him — and we’d be told that, in not so many words.
It wore the family down. It wore Cruz down. And it pushed us to a point where doing nothing felt worse than starting from scratch.
“We didn’t plan to start a care company. We set out to get Cruz the right care — and kept hitting the same walls.”
So in 2026, Nick sat down with Jess Wisniewski — a friend with more than ten years in the sector, as a support worker and as a support coordinator — and decided to build the kind of provider they’d been searching for the whole time.
That’s Cruz Care.
And the person who said yes.
Jess has spent more than ten years in the disability sector — as a support worker on the ground, and as a support coordinator helping families navigate the maze of plans, providers and paperwork.
She’s done the early shifts and the overnight ones. She’s sat with families through plan reviews, defunding letters, and the kind of weeks where everything goes sideways at once. She knows what good care looks like up close — and what bad care costs a household.
When Nick called and asked if she’d help build something better, she said yes.
Care that has to actually keep up.
Everything we do at Cruz Care is shaped by what we wished we’d had for Cruz. These are the things that aren’t negotiable for us — because they were never negotiable for him.
We hire for fit, then we train.
Cruz doesn’t need a CV. He needs someone who can keep up, read the room, and actually enjoy being around him. We meet every worker carefully — and Cruz meets them too. His opinion matters more than ours.
Active care, not couch care.
Cruz’s life is swimming, hiking, bouncing, the beach. Care that drags him to a desk isn’t care for Cruz. The staff we hire have to move — and they have to like moving.
We back the family, not just the participant.
Twenty-four-hour care needs mean a household carries twenty-four-hour weight. We build rosters that give families room to breathe, not just paperwork to file. We’ve been on the other side of that equation. We don’t forget it.
No surprises, no spin.
Plans, shifts, costs, changes — we keep families in the loop. The last thing a parent of someone like Cruz needs is another email they have to decode at 11pm.
This is what we’re here for.
Care done right doesn’t just keep someone safe — it gives them their afternoons back. Quiet moments, real ones. The kind of in-betweens where a life actually gets lived.