Neighbourhood Care

The future of health and social care is in our neighbourhoods.

Care is part of citizenship. Citizens, families and particularly women who provide most care and support. We all need help and good help:

• Helps us to be active citizens
• Strengthens and protects our families
• Keeps us connected to friends and neighbours

Today many formal systems of care don’t work in the way we need:

• Too many children and adults receive institutional care
• Women are exploited in low paid or unpaid care
• Funding is extracted from neighbourhoods
• Professionals are demoralised by centralised bureaucracies
• Means-testing increases poverty and creates crisis

However there is an alternative. 

We can invest in people and neighbourhoods, embrace new economic systems and organise in ways that help people, families and professionals to stay local. Good care should encourage flourishing and inclusive neighbourhoods for everyone. There is enormous capacity in our communities, but we need to organise to release that capacity and share responsibilities fairly.

Below you can see some of the outputs from the It’s Our Community project which we ran to develop these ideas. The Citizen Network library contains more articles and resources on Neighbourhood Care and this blog reflects on many of the themes shared in the 2023 Conference.

Join Citizen Network to stay in touch with the latest developments in Neighbourhood Care

The first It's Our Community event focused on disabled people:

Playlist: It's Our Community Part One

The second It's Our Community event focused on older people:

Playlist: It's Our Community Part Two

The third It's Our Community event focused on young people and families:

Playlist: It's Our Community Part Three