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

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?

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

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

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

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