Equal Care Co-op

  • welcome to equal care

    Power in the hands of those who matter most - the people who give and receive care and support.

    Trusted caregiving relationships that flourish
    ​Choose who supports you and who you support
    ​Workers get a decent wage without people getting support paying more
    ​Give and receive support with community volunteers

With the advent of Covid 19 in our lives, it is more important than ever to both find and give consistent, trusted, relationship-centred care and support. We wish all of you safety and the protection of your wellbeing in these strange and challenging times. 


During the outbreak we are offering our initial visits over video conferencing. We are providing PPE to all our Teams (Teams include the person getting support, family members and others closely involved in support, not just workers) and infection risk is greatly reduced through our matching approach, which means you get the person you choose coming in to support you, not a stream of different people from day to day.

Find or give trusted, reliable, excellent support

Find support
Give support
  • Tell us what's important to you - we listen to and learn from your experience. 
  • Choose who supports you - find out about independent 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.

    • 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.

      About our care and support

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      Choose

      It's a relationship of equals. Independent caregivers and receivers choose one another for the best chance of creating lasting, respectful, quality care and support relationships. Each role - giving and receiving - has control over what's important to them. 

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      Trust

      All those giving support go through a full recruitment process with application, interview and reference checks. We check that it's safe for workers to give support in people's homes and that the skill mix is right for the care and support match.
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      Give

      Giving is a natural part of being human. If you get stuck in a role where you're only receiving
      support and services from others this can make you more unwell. We give people receiving care and community volunteers the opportunities and support to help others and to be fairly rewarded for this work.
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      Ease

      We remove administrative burdens for care workers and people receiving care and support without compromising on choice, safety, personal autonomy or quality. We do this by giving people on both sides of the care relationship the tools, the skills and the confidence to organise and co-ordinate their support.
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      Belong

      We work with the kindness that already exists in communities by developing trusted circles of support around each person and amongst peers. 
      Using tried-and-tested principles of self-governance
      we will enable workers to co-ordinate the support they offer without constantly referring decisions up a management chain.

      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.

      Equal Care Co-op (also known as eccoo) is a registered, multi-stakeholder co-operative society number 4453.

      Life's too short to follow people everywhere: we don't track your visits to our site. Find our privacy policy here.

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