What is it?

A toolkit, developed by Hackney and Southwark Councils, in partnership with Equal Care Co-op, that shares the methods, approaches and outputs from the ‘Piloting a home care cooperative in Clapton’ project. It provides a service specification and practical guidance to help other boroughs implement a co-operative, community-based approach to home care.

Why did we create it?

We created this toolkit to support LOTI social care leaders and commissioners considering alternative, strengths based models and approaches to care.

The “Care commons” approach is centred around the skills of care workers, ownership of the process by care recipients and the vital role of community networks in enabling residents to live well, independently for longer.

This pilot, funded by LOTI as part of its work on radical new service models, developed five local care teams in Clapton working in a co-operative model. The approach aimed to improve outcomes for both care recipients (through better choice and community connections) and care workers (through fair pay, better training and greater autonomy).

The toolkit captures the learning from this pilot to enable other boroughs to commission and deliver this type of strength-based, localised care service.

Who should use it?

The toolkit is designed for use by:

• Social care commissioners looking to procure alternative home care models;
• Adult social care teams wanting to implement more person-centred approaches;
• Local authorities interested in co-operative or community-based care delivery;
• Community organisations and care co-operatives seeking to develop similar services in partnership with local authorities.

© London Office of Technology and Innovation, 2025. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.