Have a go

After all's said and done, no amount of reading and talking about the thing replaces actually getting stuck in and Doing the Thing, so once you've done what feels like the right amount of thinking to build your foundation, it's time to have a go.

There are a few aims at this stage:

• Favour gut learning over book learning. With your team or founding group, practise some of the core skillsets the Equal Care model relies on: team starting, peer support/supervision, and sociocratic decision-making. The sooner you jump into this stuff, the better, particularly with sociocracy.

We started off by completing the 'ELC' - the Empowered Learning Circle training offered by Sociocracy For All. This was a turning point for us as a group. People who spoke more in meetings starting speaking less and people who spoke less started speaking more. This changed the group dynamic in important ways, ultimately leading to the articulation of our purpose to redistribute power. There was a strong 'gut moment' where this felt right, the same as when we settled on our name. Sociocracy was the enabler for that.

• Pay attention to what the real world throws back at you, and try and make whatever you just did reversible. Alternatively, ignore it and forge ahead.

Full disclosure, we didn't really do this. We were working with one big, overriding idea and in some cases we stuck things out that would be better to have left earlier on. We tried to start a Circle in an area where we thought we had at least 6 people available to give support. But by the time circle meetings were really up and running those 6 people had decided against giving support (they were all coming into care either for the first time or after a long break). This meant that the circle lacked an essential side of the relationship, so wasn't able to develop past the community meetings point. It ended up taking another 4 years before we were able to come back around and start the circle for real.

• Make low stakes mistakes. Go into each new experiment assuming that you'll make mistakes. Capture these whenever they happen and course correct as needed.

One low stake mistake I (Emma) made was to overpromise and underdeliver. Easy to say it but in the case of the first person we supported, I sold the vision rather than the reality. The vision was great, the reality, not so much. We were under-resourced, hardly had any people to offer and didn't have any of the infrastructure in place to properly problem-solve or ensure that we really did have the capacity to fully fill the hours of support needed. After this experience, every new person joining the co-op was given a warning about where we were in our development and that we wouldn't be able to guarantee things like fulfilling all the hours needed, finding cover or even new team members. We possibly went too far the other way, under-promising so much that people were very nervous about working with us! It took a while to strike the balance and get it right but we did get there in the end.

We made high stakes mistakes too. One we'll share here was the original version of the model, which included two roles that were all 'people Doing To'. These were the Facilitators (a cross between a coach and a team starter but not also giving care) and the Community Circle Organiser (not local to where the circles were supposed to be starting, also not giving care).

Role design is easy to reverse when no one is in the role and hard to do when they are. These roles were not coming from our core membership: Workers, Supported and Advocate. This meant that for the first couple of years we were forever cajoling people into doing things that they didn't really want to do, without investing them with the roles and the power to do it. This meant we were working against our original purpose!

It took a while to see it and was one of the main reasons that the Circle structure took such a long time to start. Had those roles been more provisional we could have better adapted them to where we really needed to go. As it was, this extended the model's development time by a couple of years.

• Get to know each other properly: this is the time to stress-test your ways of working and decision-making. It helps build commitment and creates space for people to step away early, if needed.

This is probably the hardest bit, because it can be so easily skipped. We are really proud about how much time we did put into this, spending solid hours together as the founding group and then others who subsequently joined. One of the first principles we established was that people could adapt their commitment depending on their life circumstances.

This helped a lot and meant that trust and clarity built up amongst us all. It also gave people the opportunity to leave without guilt if it wasn't working out for them. Some people left because we were too far away from giving care at that point or because they realised the early work was going to be asking too much of them. We always felt really clear about who was able to commit to what and why.

• Put your assumptions to the test. See whether what you thought would work holds up in practice.

Aside from Equal Care's founding purpose and objectives, every single aspect of the model has been held up to the light, received some tyre-kicking and invariably ended up changed. Team starting has gone through innumerable iterations, as have the development of the team roles themselves. Circles have been attempted at least 6 times and the Registered Manager role has received several experimental runups.

We built the platform using off the shelf tools first, approximating the kind of collaboration and outcomes we wanted to see. Everything has been transitory, ephemeral, provisional, testable... One of the most important aspects of all this is that everyone in the co-op knows this. Even if you tell people it's not a substitute for how it feels. Roles can be ambiguous, shifting, changing frequently. Tech tools develop and change. An early stage co-op is not for the faint-hearted! By being clear upfront about how in flux everything was we were able to minimise a lot of the negatives around that experience. Now that the core elements of the model have been much more firmly established, the co-op has been able to offer clarity and structure needed by many people.

Luckily we've done a lot of all this so you don't have to (!) but starting any organisation will always bring a set of local, contextual experiments that need to be put to the test and done with the consent and awareness of all involved.

Service Design

To get started, the key is to define what you’re going to do, what outcomes you want to see, and how you’ll map out the path to get there (on the understanding that it will take many twists and turns along the way).

Think of what you're doing as the prototype of the larger co-op - this gives you a chance to test your assumptions about how your service will work and what impact it might have. The findings from this stage should feed directly into your full service design during the Share the Power phase.

At this point, before care or support are actually given, it's useful to start thinking about whether you'll be:

• A regulated service, providing personal care and subject to CQC inspection,

• Or an introductory agency, which sets up and supports teams but is not responsible for the ongoing delivery of personal care

Each route comes with different structures, service types and cost implications, so your choice here will significantly shape the future of your organisation. You can start as an introductory agency, which has lower administrative burdens and risks, then become regulated as you grow or stay introductory.

Equal Care decided to be regulated in order to reach the maximum amount of people and this also give access to further funding through council and NHS contracts. We started out as an introductory service and remained as this for a full year before registering. This was a crucial learning period to get ready for the extra requirements of registration and - in some ways - to make our peace with what we couldn't change, such as having to have a Registered Manager.

Funding

Starting to try stuff out, no matter how limited in scope, will require some level of funding. Working out the cash requirements for this phase can also give you valuable insight into the financial viability of the full service once launched.

You can find more detail on fundraising here, but at this early stage we recommend seeking grant funding from a values-aligned funder - ideally one who can offer more than just money, such as strategic support, visibility, or connections.

Equal Care received a range of small grants and ran a donation-based Crowdfunder, which raised over 20K for seed capital.

Lean Operations Development

At this stage, you’ll need to develop processes for how your operations will function during the pilot. This is another chance to test your assumptions - so avoid over-designing your systems, as they likely won’t work exactly as expected.

This is why this phase should remain lean: the aim is to put just enough structure in place to enable effective testing and learning from its implementation.

Recruitment

To operate your pilot, you’ll need to recruit both care workers and people who need care - or as Equal Care calls them, Team Owners, since they have ownership over and in many cases lead their Team.

The pilot gives you a chance to design and test your recruitment process. Hiring and retaining care workers is a well-known challenge. However, the co-operative, sociocratic and commons-based model has proven to be highly attractive, with significantly higher satisfaction levels than traditional care roles.

Worker Training and Platform Onboarding

Once hiring has taken place training and onboarding will be needed to ensure that care workers operate in line with your ethos and policies. Equal Care has developed the Worker Welcome Book for this purpose, alongside a well-developed, peer-lead process that helps new workers get up to speed and work effectively from the outset.

Team Formation and Caregiving

This is the core of the pilot phase: creating the teams, providing care, and measuring the outcomes based on the dimensions you've defined.

As this is a pilot, it’s important to clearly communicate the scope to everyone involved - especially if it is time-limited and the care teams will not continue into a full service.

Assessment and Iteration

Once the pilot has ended - or at least the measurement has taken place - it is time to assess, analyse, and report on the findings. This isn’t simply a yes/no decision on whether to continue; it’s a deeper evaluation of your service’s overall viability.

The outcomes will inform how the service, operational and financial model needs to work, enabling the full service to have a higher probability of succeeding.