Well-being, Relationships & Belonging Outcomes
Wellbeing Levels / Care-giving Relationships / Group Unity & Cohesion / Community Connection & Belonging
One of the organisers describes how "at one point we realised that the main thing we were able to offer was solidarity, love, belonging and connection.' One of the original ideas was to give people, particularly volunteers, material incentives for regular commitment in the form of wellbeing-related resources like free swims or coffees. But across the interviews, participants emphasize that the main incentive for them was connection and friendship. Meetings were deliberately run in a way that created opportunities for emotional connection. The organisers created check-in spaces where people could share their feelings or their hope and facilitators would always open a space by asking people to reflect on a question: "how was your week today?" or "share three things you liked this week."
One of the Care Owners spoke in her interview about the importance of the project taking place on a hyper-local level, both in terms of relationship and the practical logistics:
I was very inspired by the idea of local people doing local work. I never understood why Hackney council would try to employ a Tower Hamlets care worker. Think about it, if its bad traffic they are gong to be a week late. So not only did I believe in the idea of keeping thing local and building community. I also believed, on a practical level, that this would work.
An important benefit of this 'place-based' approach is that care workers and care receivers may have connections and relationships to one another beyond or outside of their official care role because they are part of the same community. For example, one of the paid organisers described in an interview how one of the most successful matches was between a care worker whose grandmother was a friend and fellow congregant of the care receiver. They reflected that this might be a generative approach to explore, trying to offer jobs to people who are already part of someone's informal care networks. The advantage here is that trust and a sense of mutual responsibility have already been built.
The positive relationships within the Equal Care teams and across the coop were also a key theme in the interviews with workers. The workers described the working relationships and practices within Equal Care Coop as "organic", "natural" and "flowing" in a way that supports collective problem solving. As one worker comments: "I think that everyone takes on the kind of responsibility [they want to], and what they like and what they can do.
In contrast with the transactional, 'Amazon' model of care provision, the care workers interviewed emphasized the less tangible social and emotional needs of clients:
I feel like a lot of my roles with her [the client] are more companionship than entirely personal care... what I've gathered from some of my conversations with her is that with a lot of carers outside and other companies, its like if its not stated in their role, they won't necessarily do it.
In contrast, care workers described how the wider sector commonly has organisational practices and policies explicitly intended to prevent and discourage strong bonds developing between carers and care recipients. One worker described how her employer had felt that she was becoming "too close" with one of her clients and so had allocated a different worker in her places. Other practices described include the rule that workers cannot give out their work number to clients or their families, all communication must go via the central office.
Some interviewees reflected that the project would have been easier if it had been set up by an existing community or identity based group.
The area where we set up this project - it is a place-based community organization, not an identity based project. Community of commoners who converted the toilets into a cooking school. The biggest challenge was to create a project without an existing community. It would be much much easier to make something like this happen if people were already connected. In our case it took us two years to create a regular group of 30 people.
Another interviewee shared this perspective and attributed it to the fact that the anchor organisation with which the Clapton Circle had partnered was less rooted in the community than they had been led to believe. They described it as an 'emerald palace' in that it was a high profile project but in reality more impoverished, disorganised and disconnected than it seemed from the outside. As one of the Care Owners observed, what the Clapton Circle did was really get to know the area, "but it needed more people who already had an in-depth knowlegde of the area, where the local mums have coffee, how to access the young people who need work. It's those kind of local links that really matter to make it work."
Another perspective was that actually the project was based on existing community institutions in the form of the local church congregation and other informal groups in the local area. Early in the project, one of the original circle members gave a talk at one of the services at St Thomas and through this started to recruit members. However, capacity within the congregation was limited due to the age of most of its members and the implications of this for their mental capacity and physical mobility.
Something that came up in interviews as having an impact on the quality of relationships that were built was the pace of the project. One of the interviewees observed that when the LOTI timescales were introduced, the circles meetings and culture became "a lot less relationship-centred and open, and a lot more task-oriented and closed." They reflected that it would have been valuable to create another space to preserve the relationships that people who passed through the circles valued, a space just for connection and enjoyment.
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