The potential of people-powered research to co-create care co-operatives

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"Care is also a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. Above all, to put care centre stage means recognising and embracing our interdependencies.” – The Care Collective 

Why we need to reimagine care

We can’t get through life without care. It’s part of everyone’s lives in different ways. We take on different caring roles in our relationships throughout our lives, throughout a single day, at certain points needing more care, at other points providing more care, and, perhaps, at points coordinating care. Sometimes we feel we have a say in how the care in our life is run, but more often than not, we don’t feel like agents in our own care experiences.

In recent years, there has been increasing public scrutiny on adult social care in the UK. With growing evidence of financial extraction by private providers, undermining pay, quality and local value, adult social care has been identified as an area with opportunities to develop in order to fulfil the Labour government’s pledge to double the size of the co-operative and mutuals sector. The Casey Commission, an independent commission into adult social care begun in April 2025, sets out a plan for reform and the creation of a “national care service”. But how can we ensure this meets the needs of those most closely involved in care?

Redesigning care models 

In navigating the various joys and challenges of care, we become knowledgeable experts. Despite this, the way care work is currently run rarely gives the people involved much of a say in how their care happens. One of the ways in which this can be remedied, while also addressing some of the broader challenges in the sector, is through innovative business models. Throughout the UK, there are a number of not-for-profit care businesses operating as co-operatives (Equal Care Co-op, Shepshed Carers, Co-operative Care Colne Valley, Leading Lives, and Unlimited Potential, to name a few). In a co-operative model, the business is owned and governed democratically by those that are directly involved – in this case, the care workers and also potentially the users of the care service.

The Oxfordshire Care Co-op Pilot

To explore how this model could work in Oxfordshire, we designed the Oxfordshire Care Co-op Pilot. The project aims to understand and test how co-operative and co-produced models and approaches can fill gaps in the current market and solve challenges in the adult social care sector in Oxfordshire, while also creating more democratic ownership and giving a voice to both care workers and users.

Over five months, we heard stories about the everyday ins and outs of care from community members, about how their deeply personal experiences are shaped by challenges in the adult social care sector, such as recruitment and retention, both of which are affected by issues around pay, exploitation (particularly of migrant care workers), job security, lack of autonomy and control, and lack of flexible working hours. Cross-cutting these issues are inequities for migrant care workers and those from Global Majority backgrounds being under-represented in managerial and leadership positions. 

The project has been funded by Oxfordshire County Council and has been delivered by a partnership including a number of community-based organisations, including African Families in the UK, Community Catalysts, Oxford Community Action and Dr Maria Daskalaki, Professor in Organisation Studies, Oxford Brookes University. The project is also supported by Owned By Oxford, a partnership of grassroots community enterprises and anchor institutions working to build a community-led economy.

An interview with James Blake, Chief Executive of the YHA

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Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: The Youth Hostel Association (YHA) was founded in the early twentieth century with a strong moral and social vision around access to the countryside, young people, and collective self-help. Who were the individuals and organisations that set up YHA, and what kind of organisation was it trying to be at the outset? And looking back, how much have those founding choices – around membership, voluntarism, property ownership, and regional and natural structures – shaped the institution that YHA is today?

James Blake: Youth hostelling started in Germany, just before the First World War, with schoolteacher Richard Schirrmann. In 1909, while taking his pupils on a walking tour during the holidays, they got trapped in a storm and couldn't make it to where they were expected to go. They were relatively near a school, so he decided that they would shelter inside. That gave him the idea to use buildings as facilities for young people to stay in – getting fresh air and exercise while moving freely between places. Interestingly, he never really got that vision off the ground. But Schirrmann also volunteered at a local museum, which received government investment, and Schirrmann ensured that part of that investment involved creating a place where young people could come and stay to experience the heritage and visit the countryside nearby. That became the first youth hostel – basically just a male and a female dorm with bunk beds – and the concept took off, spreading around Europe to Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands.

In the UK, people started to travel to the hostels in Germany during the 1920s. The people who were travelling around Europe included some members of the Bloomsbury group, such as John Maynard Keynes; and mountaineer George Mallory – many people connected in different ways around that time, and those ideas were flowing back into literature, history, and education. It was a time in which a whole range of social groups related to outdoor access were set up. This was also a period of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, and there was a sense from the founders of YHA that young people in cities were losing connection with the land and the countryside. In Germany, there were ways in which you could travel and stay affordably, but there were fewer in the UK. Then with the stock market crash in 1929, suddenly people really hadn’t got any money. 

Tom Fairclough, an office clerk from Liverpool, was a key figure in the UK’s hostel movement. Along with a group of friends, Fairclough visited German hostels and found inspiration in these places that allowed people to travel around freely. Back in the UK, he talked to individuals such as T.A. Leonard, who had set up the Holiday Fellowship [now HF Holidays]. At this point, others got the idea and started to set up locally based groups and associations – particularly in Merseyside and Liverpool. In April 1930, a meeting took place at the NCSS offices in London to bring together all of these groups, including the National Union of Teachers, the National Union of Students, the National Association of Boys Clubs, CPRE, and so on. We say that is the official start point of YHA as a national organisation. 

Various establishment figures, many from the Quaker tradition, also got involved. Barclay Baron became the first chair of YHA. He knew Jack Catchpool, who had worked for various organisations, including Toynbee Hall. In the first council, formed in 1930, you had the National Trust, the YMCA, the National Adult School Union, the Workers Travel Association, the Holiday Fellowship, the Countrywide Holiday Association, and the British Youth Council. They were the first organisations associated with the movement. 

What really struck me was that YHA was started as a social reform organisation, not an environmental or countryside conservation organisation... the roots were in fact very much in social reform and young people’s education.

When I first arrived at YHA, we were developing a new strategy, and I had an absolutely fascinating day in the YHA archives in the University of Birmingham. What really struck me was that YHA was started as a social reform organisation, not an environmental or countryside conservation organisation. When I started, most people, particularly older members, told me that YHA was all about countryside conservation, and some felt it had lost touch with its roots. Somehow the historical narrative had shifted, probably in the 1950s, and people had forgotten that the roots were, in fact, very much in social reform and young people’s education. That was really helpful to developing our strategy, and we went back to that founding era to look for inspiration for our social impact and purpose.

The broader point I'm making about membership organisations is that the narrative that's in the communal mind can shift away from what the original purpose was. I think your point about going back to the history is absolutely critical; actually understanding what it was, not necessarily what people say it was.

Where is the next area of growth for the co-operative movement? Is it within advancing industries, such as the tech sector, who often embody co-operative values like openness and democracy? Could the next phase of the movement be about ‘Making Co-ops Cool’ by having Tik-Tok-famous co-operative influencers ? Or is the next step for co-operative innovation held at the grassroots level?

Returning to the disruptive pioneering roots of the movement, a co-operative development body based in Preston, Lancashire, believes they have the next generation of makers, movers, and shakers. Preston Cooperative Development Network (PCDN), set up in 2017 to support the development of co-operatives in and around Preston, has lately turned its focus on empowering artists and women from marginalised communities to begin their own co-operative enterprises through two training programmes: CoLab and Lady Boss. 

The first cohort of the Lady Boss programme, run in early 2025, have since started their own catering enterprise, and are now beginning to incorporate the second cohort into the co-operative. The CoLab group, meanwhile, after visiting the artist co-operative at Northlight Art Studios in Hebden Bridge, were inspired to form their own artist co-operative, and are now in search of a building.

Preston City Council has been supporting the two programmes run by Aysha Patel and Jonny Cosmo through allocation of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. The Mayor of Preston, Councillor Sue Whittam, has also shown her support by formally awarding each of the programme’s participants with a certificate, the ceremony of which was held in Preston’s newly refurbished Harris Museum, Art Gallery and Library.

The two training programmes aimed to set up local people with the means for starting their own co-operative enterprise. Preston Cooperative Development Network works adjacent to the Preston Model, a civil procurement strategy akin to the shop-local movement, based on Mondragon. Already there are many organisations working to enhance the overall wellbeing of local people. PCDN works closely with social enterprise and grassroots organisations to develop the co-operative economy in the city area. “It’s about being at the heart of communities, and working from the ground up,” says Lady Boss course leader Aysha, who is also founder of Kind Communities CIC and a Barefoot co-operative and community business development advisor.

JGF: Your 1998 book, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, retraces the histories of several countries as they transition from the predominance of private enterprise in essential services such as water, gas, transportation, and housing; the limited regulatory capacity of municipal and national governments; the dominance of laissez-faire ideology; and the reliance on small and fragmented voluntary associations towards an expanded role for the state in social and economic life.

Can you describe the period before the start of the ‘progressive era’?

DTR: You could describe it in three ways. First, it's the age of liberated capital, when capital first breaks loose from the state’s direction. This happens in the UK, in the United States, and across most of the industrialised world. Capital also breaks loose from the mercantile pursuits that were so important in the eighteenth century. It’s the age of industrial capitalism; the factory is the symbol of the new, private, unleashed enterprise. 

It's secondly an age in which a new social utopia comes into being, an idea which we associate with Adam Smith, though he's not the only one who speaks in this way – that the best of all possible worlds is not made by designs from above but by allowing people to pursue their own self-interests. We all know the famous Adam Smith quote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Self-interest is the key to progress. Setting it loose, we get the best of all practically possible worlds. 

But then thirdly, it's also the age of Charles Dickens, its optimism undercut by a counter-sense that the new social and economic order is cruel, built across an ever-growing chasm between the newly rich and the new urban poor; that it's full of exploitation; that it’s a dystopia of a radically new sort. Dickens had no answer to the nightmares he recognised except kindness. In some ways, those whom we call progressives took that fear and urgency and tried to go beyond kindness.

JGF: How does the nature of the urban poor differ in places like Germany, Britain, and the United States?

DTR: They were all part of a strongly connected social-economic family. The United States in this era was a recipient of massive German, English, Irish, and Scottish immigration. British investment flowed abundantly into American enterprises. In these and other ways, the Atlantic economy was fundamentally transnational. But there were important differences between these three nations. A key distinction in this period was the structure of US law. Starting in the early part of the nineteenth century, American jurists began to invent something they call ‘freedom of contract’ – a constitutional principle of expansive scope and power. When states began to regulate the hours of labour by statute on the British model, American courts overturned most of their work on the grounds that individual workers and their employers must be free to enter employment contracts on whatever terms they choose. On similar grounds, regulation of railroad and public utility rates was much slower to take hold in the US than in Britain or Germany. These and many more like it were court-made decisions, issued with a constitutional authority foreign to other legal systems in the Atlantic world. 

The US state didn't completely withdraw from the social realm. Nor did “progressives” seek to employ the state only for aims we would now call progressive. Many of the people who endeavoured to bring the economy under greater public control were the same people who enforced racial segregation in the US, using the state and its police powers to achieve it. Some of them, like Theodore Roosevelt, were imperialists to the core, as were almost all their analogues in Germany.