Equal Care: Welcome to the lab

When you're deep in the day-to-day work of giving care and support, it's not always easy to step back and reflect on the wider significance of what you're doing. That's one reason why we welcome academics who are interested in our approach, and in how it is transformed into actual practice by the incredible people who make up our Equal Care Teams. 

Their studies are valuable for what they contribute towards possible futures for social care, but they are also important for us in how they validate, reinforce and sometimes reframe what we are doing, inspiring us a bit when the skies are (metaphorically, but also at the moment literally!) dark and stormy. 

That’s exactly what Nottingham Trent University researcher Maimoona Waseem and Genevieve Shanahan of Cardiff University have done with their recently-published academic paper that highlights our co-op as an example of 'transformative social entrepreneurship.'

The 'transformative' bit of that term is key: social entrepreneurship is widely recognised as a term, but the researchers frame it as generally consisting of patching up a broken system. Transformative social entrepreneurship, meanwhile, consists of building something genuinely different.

Two ways of doing things

The researchers draw a useful distinction. On one hand, there are social enterprises that try to make the existing system a bit less harmful - what they call 'compensatory social entrepreneurship' (think of a sticking plaster on a wound). On the other, there are organisations like our own that set out to address the root causes of that harm by building alternatives.

We've written before about how mainstream care provision increasingly resembles a 'Deliveroo model': workers allocated tasks based on availability, relationships sacrificed for efficiency, care reduced to bullet points on a rota. A compensatory approach might try to make that system slightly less dehumanising (perhaps adding a smiley face to an automated instruction?). A transformative approach essentially asks: what if we stopped treating workers like tools, and stopped reducing people to their care needs?

What makes something transformative

The paper identifies Equal Care as transformative because of how we combine digital, social, and democratic innovations to challenge what they describe as "the exploitative UK care system."

On the digital side, they note how our platform "facilitates the coordination of care via small, self-managed 'circles'... through which data, care plans, and practical information can be shared." Crucially, they observe that "this form of decentralised coordination reduces administrative burden while strengthening trust, thereby eliminating the need for centralised management, reporting, and surveillance."

This matters because relationships shouldn't be a 'nice-to-have' in care - they should be seen as fundamental! A carer who knows you well notices when something's wrong. This familiarity allows them to trust their gut responses and, crucially, to act on that feeling when they are part of a trusted, well-connected team. Trust saves lives. Yet the 'Deliveroo model' of care actively prevents these relationships from forming.

The researchers highlight how our approach enables "social innovations: instead of short, task-based visits following procedures standardised across all clients, Equal Care's decentralised approach means that care can be tailored to the requirements of each individual care recipient." They also note that working arrangements "can be adapted to suit the diverse needs of individual careworkers, who are valued as skilled professionals and as members of the collective."

On governance, the paper points to our cooperative structure as essential: "Co-ownership guards against top-down governance by unaccountable corporate actors. Instead, governance power is decentralised and distributed, enabling situated, relational coordination that fosters autonomy and reduces power imbalances."

Laboratories of possibility

Perhaps the most interesting framing in the paper is how it describes organisations like Equal Care as 'laboratories of social innovation' - places where people "experiment with possible futures" and develop approaches that can be adapted by communities elsewhere.

This way of describing what we do feels right. We're not claiming to solve everything wrong with the care system on our own, but we are proving that certain changes are possible within the system we are a part of. Those changes are only possible however, when workers are trusted and given freedom to collaborate and experiment with different ways of working. When these innovations demonstrate their worth - when care recipients report better quality of life, when workers feel valued and autonomous, when relationships flourish - other communities can adapt these approaches to their own contexts. 

It’s this thinking which led us to develop our Playbook - an online document covering our development, approach and everything we have learned that we produced with generous funding from the London Office of Technology Innovation. We want communities who are looking for an alternative to the dominant model of care to have a starting point - something to learn from and adapt to their own purposes, and ultimately contribute to the improvement and growth of our model itself - something far more important than a single organisation growing. 

As the article puts it: "While traditional scaling faces institutional and regulatory constraints, the Equal Care approach can grow through diffusion and adaptation by communities in other regions."

Transformation, not just disruption

The researchers' conclusion captures something important: "By reframing care as abundant, relational, and co-owned, Equal Care offers a genuinely transformative challenge to the systemic problems of care in the UK."

This distinction between transformation and disruption matters. Plenty of companies have 'disrupted' care over the years - usually by finding new ways to extract value while degrading working conditions and fragmenting relationships. As the article suggests, examples like this are not that different to what the likes of Uber have done in their own sectors. Transformation means building something fundamentally different.

It's great to be recognised by academics and to have Equal Care's reputation bolstered by studies that confirm we're on the right track. But what this really shows is how the daily work our Equal Care teams do translates into results that can be observed by qualified researchers and documented. Our model can sound great on paper, but it's our teams that are giving it life and demonstrating how it actually works, every single day by building relationships, making decisions together, and demonstrating that care and support can truly be different.

Read the full academic article: Waseem, M. and Shanahan, G. (2026) Building alternative futures: The role of prefiguration in social entrepreneurship in The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14657503261416701