Scott Darraugh & Ross Murray – Tackling the crisis in children’s residential care with local, cooperative solutions
- August 2024
There have been some really exciting shifts and changes for us at Co-operative Care Colne Valley so it feels the right time to share some of the news with you all who are part of CCIN.
In case this is the first time you’re hearing about us, we are a newly emerging multi-stakeholder care co-op in Colne Valley, Kirklees, West Yorkshire.
Firstly, the big news – after months and years of ideas, thoughts, preparations and planning we have started to offer care and support in our community. It feels very exciting! We know this is just a start and there are plenty of lessons to be learnt ahead of us and at the same time we want to appreciate that we would not have got this far on our own. We’ve had great support from the co-operative community, local authority and from our members who have been a big part of this journey, have supported us in many different ways and have made our progress possible.
Making great care available and possible in other parts of the country, replicate and federate, has been part of our vision since the very beginning. We’ve received generous support from Power to Change to share the learning from our journey with others who might be interested in setting up a care co-operative in their local community.
That is how the Sharing Care project has come about. We have been working on bringing together people who are part of co-operative and care worlds to share the learning, experiences and knowledge that is already out there. We have drafted a toolkit for those who are considering setting up a care co-op and we’re looking forward to making it better with help from others. We’re exploring a couple of research pieces, reviving and pulling together some previous learning and working towards a good practice quality mark/framework of ‘Fair Care’. We are also running webinars – some sessions with really insightful speakers already happened and you can watch them on our learning website and there is more to come too.
Learn more about our approach to care on our website and if any of the CCIN members would like to hear from us from time to time and/or co-operate, please do get in touch. We can only make positive change for social care happen if we work together and care and share.
Veronika Susedkova
Sharing Care Coordinator
Co-operative Care Colne Valley