Real Good Care Collective
Building more capability for care around a community
- Area
- Community Care · Practical Support
- Stage
- Development stage: Designing
There is a substantial range of useful support that sits between handling something entirely alone and entering a formal specialist service.
People help one another in that space constantly. They listen, explain something unfamiliar, make an introduction, help organise a task, share relevant experience, accompany someone through a difficult process, or notice that another person could use support.
Communities already produce many of these forms of care informally. The Real Good Care Collective asks what becomes possible when a community develops that capability more deliberately.
The objective is to strengthen the everyday forms of support that sit around specialist practice, while keeping the distinction between community care and specialist practice clear.
That means developing people who are good at welcoming participants, facilitating conversations, providing practical guidance, helping organise next steps, recognising when a person may need something more specialised, and making an appropriate connection when they do.
It also means maintaining relationships with people and organisations that hold specialist capabilities the community can draw on.
Over time, the Care Collective could become a connective layer around Real Good Communities: people who know how to help within their role, understand where that role ends, and know how to bring in additional capability when it is needed.
Current areas of development
- Contributor roles
- Defining the different ways people can contribute care, guidance, facilitation and practical support.
- Boundaries
- Clarifying what belongs within community support and what should move into specialist practice.
- Safeguarding
- Developing practices appropriate to the kinds of interactions the community enables.
- Training
- Identifying the knowledge and skills that help contributors perform their roles well.
- Referral relationships
- Building connections with specialist organisations and practitioners.
- Peer and group formats
- Exploring where support is best provided through one-to-one interaction, peer connection or structured group activity.
The aim is to strengthen the community’s capacity to care, as one valued part of a wider network of support.
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