The Role of Teams in the Community Care Network
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Most regulated domiciliary care and support providers remain largely invisible within their local communities. Care workers visit people’s homes and deliver vital support, but do so with little opportunity for interaction, collaboration, or recognition from the wider network of local residents, services, and groups.
By putting Equal Care teams and care and support workers on the map - literally - we aim to challenge that invisibility and situate care work within the broader landscape of community life.
Mapping our teams alongside other local assets, like community hubs, mutual aid groups and charities, sends a clear message: care teams are part of the community, not separate from it.
Rather than being isolated actors delivering transactional care, our workers become visible, valued contributors to the ecosystem of care. This visibility fosters a greater sense of belonging and connection - both for care workers and those they support.
By positioning care work alongside schools, food projects, faith spaces, and local initiatives, we elevate its status from private service to public good.
This challenges the idea that care is only something that happens behind closed doors, and reframes it as essential community infrastructure - just as critical to local wellbeing as a health centre or children’s centre. It’s a step toward helping people appreciate the knowledge, emotional labour, and contribution of care workers in a deeper, more visible way.
Being visible on the same map as other services opens the door to new partnerships. Teams and circles can more easily connect with local organisations, charities and informal groups to:
Share knowledge
Co-host events or activities
Tap into existing networks of support
This makes it easier to meet people’s full quality of life needs, not just their care needs - bringing in things like companionship, meaningful occupation, access to shared spaces, and more.
Making care teams more visible encourages shared responsibility for care.
Rather than seeing social care as something ‘done to’ the community, it becomes something co-produced with the community. That shift opens space for volunteers, family members, neighbours, and others to become active contributors in a network of mutual support.
It also helps foster a stronger sense of accountability - care isn’t just a service you receive, it’s part of a shared commitment to well-being across the neighbourhood.
Too often, care workers are seen as faceless or interchangeable. By mapping them in context - as part of teams, circles, relationships, and community spaces - we highlight that care workers are people with knowledge, relationships, responsibilities and skills.
They are not just deliverers of tasks, but part of people’s lives.
Much of conventional domiciliary care focuses on basic physical tasks: hygiene, medication, meals, mobility. These are important, but they often leave out the social and emotional fabric that makes life feel meaningful.
Through our community mapping and our broader model of work, Clapton Care Circle set out to enrich the experience of care by collaborating with local actors to bring emotional support, social connection, and meaningful activity into the picture.
The result is a more holistic model where care is something relational and communal, not just functional.
By visualising and valuing teams as part of the community, we are:
Recognising the full contribution of care workers
Making space for collaboration and mutual aid
Elevating the status of care as a shared, public good
Challenging the isolation and invisibility of conventional models
Humanising the work and relationships that make up social care
Reinforcing a more community-rooted, relationship-centred approach
This visibility isn’t just symbolic - it’s a strategic shift toward care that is more connected, more inclusive, and more rooted in place.