London

Piloting co-operative care in London: the final quarter

As we enter the last quarter of our LOTI-funded pilot of a care commons in Clapton, our team is shifting focus from recruitment, team building and community mapping to producing a service specification, evaluation framework and playbook for Commons-based care. Much of our work on the latter is informed by

Neurodiversity Celebration Week - Liz's story

For Neurodiversity Celebration Week, I spoke to our colleague Liz about her own experiences of being autistic and how it shapes her work and interactions with others.  As well as giving care and support in Calderdale, Liz plays a pivotal role in our Co-op's path forward as a

London

Paying for Care

Starting a care service with limited resources is like dealing with a chicken-and-egg problem. You need both care workers and people who need care to get started, but you can't get one without the other; which comes first?

A journey beyond loss: My reflections on grief and care

In the past, I've wanted to share chirpy, positive thoughts and observations from the perspective of someone who has both given support at Equal Care and worn a multitude of Circle and Team ‘Hats’ alongside being a carer for my own family members, a loyal friend, a supportive

London

Mapping a local landscape of care and belonging, Clapton Common

Equal Care Coop and Clapton Commons are mapping a local landscape of care and support in Clapton Common, Upper Clapton. Using KUMU, a powerful system mapping platform, we are creating an interactive map that makes the often invisible grassroots networks of care and support more visible and accessible to people

London

Atlas Caremaps & Equal Care. The role of care mapping.

From birth to death, we are always nested within various systems of care and support, both large and small. These systems are crucial for our well-being. While we may become more self-reliant as adults, these broader support systems remain essential. Even when we aren't actively giving or receiving

London

Engaging the power of the Commons

Clapton Common, where our new project takes place, is situated in Upper Clapton, a neighbourhood defined by a breadth of cultures including the largest strictly Orthodox community in Europe. Many of the shared resources and services that residents of Upper Clapton rely upon are owned and managed by either private

London

Activating the unrealised potential of care networks

Equal Care's pilot in Commons-based care in Hackney builds on five years of work developing and delivering a ‘teams model’ of home care in Calderdale, Yorkshire. Taken together, our current teams and new commons approach seek to resolve two fundamental problems with the traditional service model, a disconnection

London

A new service model allowing care and support to exist in abundance

Is this title met with excitement or disbelief? Whatever response this title first evokes, readers will have to admit that it certainly is in the realm of possibility; Care and Support can indeed exist in abundance. At Equal Care Co-op, we are developing a new model of home care that

Putting data in the right hands: GMCA grant enables us to continue empowering workers

We were founded with a clear purpose: to address the fundamental flaws in social care by putting power in the hands of those who matter most - the people who give and receive care and support. Step by step, we are developing and testing a model of social care that

Equal Code: DuckDB for logs analysis

How we use DuckDB to analyse application logs quickly and effectively.

Equal Voices: Molly, Iris & Dora

In this blog, the incredible Molly talks about her experiences of giving care and support alongside her poodle Dora and the joy it has brought to both her and those she supports. Being able to incorporate pets into care and support is something that I think the majority of us

Our Back on Track Community Share Offer is closing!

If you would like to join us on this journey as an Investor Member, you have until 11:59pm on Wednesday 15 March 2023.

What is wrong with this picture?

Last week our Lead Engineer Matt invited you all to try your hand at producing some art using some Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that he has used to generate images for his Equal Code blog. The request was for images of people giving and receiving care and support, and one

Equal Code: Stable Diffusion

One simple way that we're taking advantage of AI to help ourselves craft this very blog post series.

How we work: introducing sociocracy

There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians, no matter how well-meaning, are better at solving problems than the people on the spot, who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right. -Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize in Economics, 2009 Full disclosure: I wasn’t aware of sociocracy

equal-code

Equal Code: re-inventing the training wheels [Part One]

This is part one in a new series where we're looking at our difficulties with contributing to the national Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS). Along the way, we're going to build ourselves a real replacement system that patches over the missing functionality that we

Care Mapping: A chat with Amber

Who do you provide care and support for? Who cares for, or supports you? For many, the immediate response to these questions might seem relatively straightforward: a quick roll-call of close family members, maybe a couple of close friends. However like most things in life, the closer you examine these

Bringing an end to Deliveroo-style care

The scenario is now familiar to most of us who have ordered anything online. You need something - a gift, a takeaway - and you click through options on a screen before you arrive at your choice and click order. Then, after a specified amount of time a person arrives

equal-code

Equal Code: Bending the rrules

Learn about a small technique that we use to keep track of recurring calendar bookings within our graph database.

equal-code

Equal Code: Winning The Race

One of the battles of any startup is competing against the "big fish" in your sector. In this edition of Equal Code, we're going to look at one of the small ways in which our little co-operative outcompetes our much larger competitors.

equal-code

Equal Code: cypher-template-strings

Hello and welcome to the first in a new series that's going to be published regularly from Equal Care Co-op: Equal Code. This series is aimed at the more technical folk in our community.

International Day of People with Disabilities

“Very few of us are leaving this world without becoming Disabled. If injury or illness doesn’t make us Disabled, old age is highly likely to do so… To look disability in the eye is to look at ourselves, and our future selves, in the eye."

equal-code

Equal Code 📲

Today marks a big day in the evolution of the Equal Care calendars: you can now reply to bookings to tell your team whether you are attending or not!

London

Ubuntu & Inequality

This is an interview conducted between two of Equal Care's London Circle members, Luke Tanner and Florence Nazziwa. Find out more about Luke and Florence at equalcare.coop. Luke So Florence, I want to talk to about your experience of care work, your professional development and Cooperative Care.