Community Care Mapping Tool
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Developed and refined during our Clapton Commons pilot, this interactive community-mapping tool harnesses Kumu’s system-mapping capabilities to surface—and strengthen—the often-invisible networks of care and support in Upper Clapton. We now offer it as a flexible template for other care providers, community groups, and local initiatives to visualize their own “care wealth” and foster deeper collaboration.
By adopting this care-mapping template, your organisation can quickly illuminate local care ecosystems, strengthen cooperative ties, and harness community assets for more abundant, commons-based support. Whether you’re a small grassroots collective or an established provider, this tool empowers you to see—and shape—the social architecture of care in your own neighbourhood.
Use the link here to open in your browser.
A different version of this tool, more aligned to our specification for A Care Commons Service can be found in the Service Map page.
In many communities, formal care services—healthcare providers, social workers, and professional organizations—operate in silos, rendering their work largely invisible to the very networks of family, friends, and volunteers that also provide care. This fragmentation prevents care workers from tapping into rich, grassroots support systems and limits opportunities for collaboration that could enrich and extend their impact.
Structural constraints—tight schedules, regulatory boundaries, and the lack of shared communication channels—further isolate formal providers from informal caregivers. As a result, unpaid acts of support go unrecognized, and community-based resources remain underutilized, weakening the overall resilience and responsiveness of the local care ecosystem.
Our interactive care-mapping tool was designed to break down these barriers by visualizing every connection—paid or volunteer, professional or personal—that contributes to someone’s well-being. By integrating formal services with informal networks on a single, dynamic platform, the tool makes hidden “care wealth” visible, promotes cross-sector collaboration, and builds trust between all participants.
Through this shared map, care providers can discover and coordinate with local volunteers, mutual-aid groups, and cultural organizations, transforming care from a narrowly task-focused service into a holistic, relationship-centered model. Ultimately, the tool enriches the quality of care by ensuring resources flow freely across formal and informal boundaries, supporting not only physical needs but also emotional, social, and cultural well-being.
“Care wealth” encompasses the full spectrum of activities—paid, unpaid, formal, and informal—that sustain individual and community well-being. Our mapping tool makes this hidden economy visible by:
Documenting Diverse Care Roles
Users tag each node with the types of care provided: from psychologists and home-health aides to mutual-aid groups and volunteer companions.
Family and kinship contributions (informal financial help, childcare, elder support) are captured alongside professional services.
Tracking Care Flows
Connections between nodes record how care moves through the network—whether via formal partnerships (e.g., between agencies) or informal assistance (e.g., neighbors helping with groceries).
This flow data reveals where care wealth is generated, how it’s sustained, and where pockets of need or untapped capacity exist.
Visualizing Interdependence
By overlaying role and connection fields, the map highlights the interlocking relationships that underpin community resilience—showing how each act of care contributes to a collective safety net.
Through these features, the tool transforms abstract care labor into concrete, data-driven insights—empowering communities to recognize, value, and strategically bolster their own care wealth.
Relationship Visualization
Displays formal and informal care actors (paid workers, volunteers, family, community groups) as nodes.
Renders their connections—from casual contact to sustained collaboration—so coordinators can spot gaps and opportunities.
Resource Discovery & Matching
Filters highlight local assets (e.g., transport services, befriending programs, faith groups) against care recipients’ needs and preferences.
Supports asset-based community development by matching resources to mapped needs.
Social Impact Tracking
Enables Social Network Analysis (SNA) to monitor changes in connectivity, cohesion, and “care density” over time.
Provides visual benchmarks for measuring pilot goals, such as new cooperative ties or increased volunteer engagement.
Commons-Based Coordination
Promotes a local “gift economy”—tagged nodes and links record both paid services and “gifted” time (e.g., volunteer floristry sessions).
Helps teams track cumulative informal contributions, making a community’s collective care visible and valued.
Makes Invisible Networks Visible
Comprehensive Actor Inventory: Captures formal providers (care agencies, social workers) alongside informal supporters (family, neighbors, volunteers), ensuring every contributor to well-being is documented.
Uncovers Hidden Resources: Surfaces grassroots initiatives—mutual aid groups, faith-based volunteers, hobby clubs—that rarely appear in official directories but play a vital care role.
Visualizes Care Flows: Uses network diagrams to show how support moves between actors, revealing central “hubs,” under-connected nodes, and potential collaboration pathways.
Strengthens Local Collaboration
Identifies Synergies: Highlights overlapping missions or complementary services (e.g., a food-delivery volunteer and a medical transport provider) to seed joint initiatives.
Facilitates Pooled Resources: Encourages shared use of assets—meeting spaces, vehicles, equipment—by mapping who owns what and where capacity exists.
Accelerates Partnership Building: Provides a common reference point for introductions and co-planning, reducing the time and effort typically needed to establish trust.
Empowers Community Ownership
User-Driven Updates: Enables care recipients, family members, and volunteers to add or edit nodes and connections, keeping the map current and grounded in lived experience.
Democratizes Data: Shifts map maintenance from a single authority to a collaborative process, so community members directly shape how their networks are represented.
Fosters Stewardship: By giving local actors control over the map’s evolution, it builds a sense of custodianship and accountability for sustaining the care commons.
Supports Data-Driven Planning
Real-Time Insights: Offers live dashboards and snapshots of network density, connection growth, and service gaps to inform outreach strategies.
Targeted Volunteer Recruitment: Uses filterable views (e.g., by geography, skill set, or service type) to pinpoint areas with unmet demand and recruit volunteers or partners accordingly.
Evidence for Funding & Policy: Generates exportable visuals and metrics (e.g., number of unique connections, types of care provided) to demonstrate impact to funders, commissioners, and decision-makers.
Offers Flexibility and Adaptability
Customizable Fields & Views: Users can tailor node attributes, connection types, and visual layouts to match their unique care contexts—whether tracking clinical services, volunteer roles, or community events.
Scalable Across Contexts: Equally effective for small neighborhood initiatives or larger multi-agency collaborations; teams can start simple and layer in complexity as their needs evolve.
Easy Template Duplication: New care providers or community groups can duplicate the base map—complete with preset fields and filters—and immediately customize it with their own data.
Ongoing Evolution: As local priorities or organizational structures change, the map can be reconfigured on the fly, ensuring it remains a living tool that grows alongside the community.
To begin, visit Kumu’s website and sign up for a free account. This will give you access to the platform’s basic features, which are sufficient for exploring and using the care mapping tool.
2. Access the Project
Once logged in, search for the Clapton Common Care Map or use the direct link provided by the project administrator. You will be able to view the map and explore the connections between the different care organizations, groups, and individuals.
3. Fork the Project
To adapt the tool for your own needs:
• Click on the “Fork” button in the top-right corner of the project page. This will create a copy of the map in your own Kumu account.
• Once forked, you can customize the map by adding your own elements (organizations, groups, care teams) and connections, tailoring it to reflect your local care network.
4. Adapt the Template
With your own copy of the map, you can:
• Modify the existing relationships to reflect your local context.
• Add or remove elements based on your community’s needs.
• Edit labels, descriptions, and categories to suit the structure and language of your care network.
5. Collaborate with Others
You can invite other community members to collaborate on your map by sharing the project link or granting them editing access. This fosters a collective approach to building and maintaining the care network.
By forking the project and adapting the template, you can use this care mapping tool to explore and enhance your own community’s care landscape.
The Kumu platform is used to create an interactive relationship map, not a geographical one. It is designed to represent and analyze complex networks, focusing on how people, organizations, and teams within the community are interconnected.
Key Elements:
Organization: Includes local services, religious centers, community organizations, and businesses
Group: Refers to informal collectives and incoorporated groups such as mutual aid, peer support of community groups.
Supported Person: Refers to the people in receipt of regulated care and support living within the locality.
Business: refers to any business that may play a role in someones care and support or the well-being and or resilience of the community network as a whole.
Person: refers to local residents, friends, family or volunteers that play a role in supoporting someone or the community network as a whole.
Regulated Care Provider: Licensed or registered agencies and professionals (e.g., home-care agencies, domiciliary nurses, adult day-care centers) whose services comply with formal oversight bodies (such as the CQC in England).
Connections:
Thin solid lines represent a confirmed connection or past collaborations
Thick solid lines represent an active connection, involving an ongoing collaboration that is generating value
Dashed lines indicate pending or yet-to-be-established relationships.
Narrative Pop-Ups
Each node on the map can display a rich information card—known as a narrative pop-up—when clicked. Click on any Node or connections and read the Profile Panel, which includes:
Biography: A brief description of who this actor is and their role in the community.
Services Offered: A list of formal or informal supports they provide (e.g., meal delivery, companionship, clinical care).
Care-Related Notes: Contextual details such as accessibility considerations, cultural preferences, or history of collaboration.
Filter the map to focus on specific care modalities, activities, or statuses:
Care Type: Formal vs. informal providers
Activity: Transport, social events, clinical support, volunteer befriending, etc.
Status: Active, inactive, or emerging actors Combine filters and keyword search (e.g., “dementia”) to drill down into exactly the network slice you need.
Layouts & Views Choose from multiple preset layouts to reveal different patterns:
Radial: Centers on one node and arranges connected nodes in concentric rings—ideal for mapping an individual’s support network.
Cluster: Automatically groups nodes by shared tags or connection density—useful for spotting service clusters (e.g., all local befriending groups).
Geospatial Proxy: Arranges nodes roughly according to their real-world locations—helpful for planning local outreach.
Export & Share Options
Snapshot Export (PDF/PNG): Capture the current view for reports or presentations—select resolution and page size before downloading.
Embed Live Map: Copy the embed code to display an interactive version on your website or intranet.
Duplication Link: Generate a “Make a Copy” URL so other groups can fork the template with all fields and filters intact.
Permissioned Links: Create read-only or editor links to control who can view or update the map.
Collaborative Editing Role-based permissions enable secure teamwork:
Administrator: Full control over map settings, user roles, and templates.
Editor: Can add/edit nodes and connections, update profile fields, and comment.
Viewer: Read-only access for safe sharing with external stakeholders. Additional features include real-time simultaneous editing, threaded comments on nodes/connections, and a version history for rollback or audit.
The mapping tool presents both opportunities for enhanced community collaboration and challenges related to implementation.
Challenges:
Resource Limitations: Gathering and updating data requires substantial time and effort from both care mappers and community members. It is highly unlikely that individual care provider will have this capacity, partnerships with local anchor community organizations are therefore essential for its use.
Community Engagement: Ensuring participation from local organizations and individuals can be difficult, especially if they don’t immediately perceive the map’s benefits or don't feel confident in using tech.
Evolving Relationships: Connections in the community are dynamic, constantly changing as new relationships form or old ones dissolve. Updating the map to reflect these changes is time-consuming.
Opportunities:
Collaborative Networks: By working with local partners and using collective knowledge, the mapping process can be more efficient and engaging.
Care Wealth Visibility: The tool brings visibility to “care wealth,” highlighting the often-unseen value of both paid and unpaid care activities.
Building a Care Commons: The map supports the creation of a local Care Commons by visualizing the community care network and encouraging collaborative stewardship of care resources.
Enriching Care Beyond Task-Based Support: Collaborating with local community networks allows care providers to offer more holistic, relationship-centered care, addressing not just physical but also emotional and social needs. This enhances the overall care experience, promoting well-being and deeper connections for those receiving care.
Ongoing Maintenance and Use
The map requires regular updates to remain relevant, which can be achieved through scheduled check-ins with participants and by encouraging self-updates via Kumu. Training sessions for community members can also help them engage with the tool effectively, ensuring that the map reflects the evolving nature of local care networks.
By addressing challenges, leveraging local collaborations, and fostering ongoing engagement, the care mapping tool can become an integral part of sustaining and strengthening care networks in the community.