The Global Ageing Network features Guardian Angels' Global Care Recruiters
The Global Ageing Network recently featured Global Care Recruiters, a nurse-recruitment initiative Guardian Angels Senior Services helped launch in August 2024. Traci Larson, Guardian Angels' president and CEO, is a co-founder and partner of the organization, which recruits NCLEX-licensed registered nurses from Kenya for senior-care jobs in the United States.
The Global Ageing Network article covers how the initiative started, what it does, and the results so far. This post summarizes the key points and points readers to the full feature for details.
Minnesota's long-term care staffing gap
The shortage GCR was built to address is well documented. Minnesota long-term care providers reported about 11,750 vacant positions statewide as of early 2026, according to LeadingAge Minnesota's newsletter coverage, split roughly between assisted living and nursing facilities. A 2025 Long-Term Care Imperative survey put vacancies around 12,500 and said they continued to "challenge access" to care. By March 2026, 35% of Minnesota nursing homes had waiting lists, and facilities were turning away an average of more than 13 admissions a month due to staffing gaps.
Vacancy rates for certified nursing assistants and other unlicensed staff have run around 15.6% in assisted living and 20.7% in nursing homes, with some facilities citing workforce pressure as a reason they're considering closing. That's the gap Global Care Recruiters set out to fill.
A trip to Nairobi that turned into a partnership
Global Care Recruiters traces back to a single trip. In January 2024, LeadingAge Minnesota organized a delegation to Nairobi, Kenya, led by Minnesota State Representative Mohamud Noor. The group attended the opening of a new NCLEX training and testing center, a Pearson VUE site that meant Kenyan nurses no longer had to travel to Johannesburg, England, or India just to sit for the U.S. licensing exam.
Among the delegation were Guardian Angels CEO Traci Larson, Dustin Lee of Prairie Senior Cottages, and Roger White of Mount Olivet. According to the Global Ageing Network's account, the three saw an opportunity: a growing pool of NCLEX-licensed Kenyan nurses with no clear path to Minnesota's aging-services jobs, and a visa category, EB-3, built for exactly that kind of long-term placement.
That observation became Global Care Recruiters. The full feature from the Global Ageing Network covers the trip in more depth, including the training center visit and other stops on the itinerary.
How the recruitment and visa process works
Global Care Recruiters connects NCLEX-licensed Kenyan registered nurses with U.S. senior-care employers, using the EB-3 employment-based visa category, a permanent immigration pathway designed for skilled and professional workers with a standing job offer.
GCR screens candidates for NCLEX-pass status and other professional qualifications before matching them with an employer. From there, the organization says it coordinates the immigration paperwork and works with a U.S. legal team to guide each nurse through the EB-3 green-card process, and it says nurses do not pay placement or recruitment fees, with GCR covering immigration-process costs instead. GCR also describes offering relocation support once a nurse is approved, including help with housing, travel, onboarding, and licensing steps in the new state.
These are claims GCR makes about its own services on its website, not independently verified figures. But the mechanism is clear: match a licensed nurse in Kenya to an open role in Minnesota, then handle the visa and moving logistics that would otherwise stall the process for months or years.
Four Minnesota providers behind GCR
Global Care Recruiters was founded by four LeadingAge Minnesota member organizations: Guardian Angels Senior Services, Mount Olivet Careview Home, Prairie Senior Cottages, and Vista Prairie Communities. According to the Global Ageing Network feature, the founders are Traci Larson of Guardian Angels, Roger White of Mt. Olivet, Dustin Lee of Prairie Senior Cottages, and Jim Bettendorf of Vista Prairie Communities.
In July 2026, LeadingAge Minnesota Solutions entered a strategic partnership with GCR, providing executive leadership and operational support to the organization. GCR says it remains independently governed, with the partnership built to strengthen the provider-led model the four founding organizations created.
GCR's numbers so far
According to the Global Ageing Network feature, GCR signed contracts with 17 nurses in its first year and had reached 41 by year two, with more than 60 Kenya-based RNs in the U.S.-bound pipeline and over 100 candidates moving through legal review and employer interviews.
That growth tracks with the demand outlined earlier: Minnesota's long-term care providers turning away admissions, waiting lists at more than a third of nursing homes, and a recruitment pipeline built specifically to fill that gap.
Where to get the full story
This recap covers the basics, but the Global Ageing Network's reporting goes deeper into how GCR works day to day and what founders and early hires have to say about it. Read the full feature, "A Great Win-Win: Members Partner on Global Recruitment to Address Workforce Needs," on the Global Ageing Network site.
Guardian Angels is glad to be one of the four founding partners behind GCR, and glad to see the work getting coverage from an organization that tracks aging-services issues worldwide. For anyone dealing with staffing gaps in senior care, or just curious how a Minnesota-Kenya nurse pipeline actually gets built, the original article is worth the few minutes it takes to read.
Sources
- A Great Win-Win: Members Partner on Global Recruitment to Address Workforce Needs — Global Ageing Network
Guardian Angels helps strengthen senior care staffing through a new LeadingAge Minnesota partnership
