Back in April, at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., a motley group of social scientists, researchers, artists and activists convened to discuss the value of the work of our nation’s “maintainers.” They’re the unheralded bunch who don’t get showered with attention as innovators (think Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg) do.

To make his point, Lee Vinsel, a conference organizer and an assistant professor at Stevens, argued that the world needs more Mary Poppins. The famed nanny’s story, Vinsel believes, “asserts that the most important thing in life is an ethics of care, that we can only see the world with clear eyes if we choose to value one another, and that an essential way of doing this is by undertaking underappreciated and undervalued mundane, ordinary labor.”