Equal Care Co-op

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Find or give trusted care and support in Calderdale or Hackney

Find support

Give support

Tell us what's important to you - we offer all kinds of support, ranging from personal care and practical jobs, to help with life admin and community advocacy, to mental health and wellbeing support.
Choose who supports you - find out about our workers' interests, skills and experience and know that they are getting a decent wage without you paying more.
Build your own Team - include friends and family members closely involved, together with community volunteers.

Offer kind, expert care that plays to your strengths, expertise and experience.
Fit work to your life, not the other way round. Set your rates and the times you work - get a decent wage for the skilled work you do.
You both choose - it's a mutual decision to say yes to the support. This means you don't support lots of different people day after day, but get the chance to build, lasting, fulfilling caregiving relationships without the rush.

Become a member of your local Circle - learn new skills in care, co-operation and wellbeing, support your peers and be supported in turn.
Join our co-operative - become an owner of Equal Care Co-op and shape decisions and our evolution.
We want to grow. Invest in Equal Care to develop a kinder, more resilient way of caregiving!

About our care and support

Why are we doing this?

Wages

Professional care and support practitioners are paid abominably. Many of them are in working poverty. We think this crucial and demanding job is worth much more than the minimum wage and should stop being rated at the bottom of the UK's wage scale.

In the absence of more money available we're setting out to pay as much as possible to workers, passing on the maximum income to them whilst remaining sustainable at normal market rates.

Power

Social care is full of inequitable relationships: between council and provider, between provider and worker, between people getting support and all of those. When you are stuck in these types of low-status, high-stress relationships you get ill and you get sad.

We are a co-operative. We're using alternative governance structures to share power. We're transparent. Joining us means you see where the money goes, who's being paid what and you participate in the decision-making.

Scarcity

The vacancy rate in social care is already massive.

And it's getting bigger and bigger as we all get older.

We're working on making the job much more attractive through higher rates of pay and real choice. We're introducing an alternative currency to facilitate voluntary work from people receiving support themselves and community members. We want to help redefine care and support as an abundant resource that we (i.e. all us humans) can all contribute to and benefit from.

Technology

Care and support technology is developing at a crazy pace. But shiny software doesn't remove intrinsic biases. Much of the tech on the market prioritises the manager's perspective and a surveillance, 'regulation-first' culture. The companies selling it are also mostly subject to the high-growth, fast-exit rules of venture capital culture.

We think that co-operatively owned technology that is co-created by and accountable to members will go a long, long way towards tackling these problems.