Creative Care: A Co-operative Art Workshop

This workshop is designed to be a quick, fun, enjoyable and thought provoking art session that will be a first step to considering the benefits of a co-operative care company. Everybody will leave with their own mini art book to take home and contribute to a giant collective community book.

Increasingly large numbers of people need support with their day to day living; this might be provided by family members, friends and acquaintances, paid workers or a mixture of all three. Currently people who provide care, whether paid or otherwise, often feel undervalued and if paid often receive low wages and have difficult working conditions. Sometimes the companies that employ the care workers make profits which go to shareholders who have no interest in the way the company is run. There are now care provision companies that run on a co-operative basis, where the company is owned by the care workers or the people receiving the care or their families or a mixture of all three. Everybody has an equal vote when making decisions about wages, what happens to profit, how people are matched up and other important decisions.

Jane Glynn, artist, www.janeglynn.co.uk

Dr Francesca Gagliardi, Reader in Institutional Economics, University of Hertfordshire

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