Start a care cooperative in your community.
Make a one-page plan for a first meeting in your city. Print it or share it. It stays on your phone.
Caring for someone now? Start at co-op.care, the first one, in Boulder, Colorado.
Vimty in 15 seconds
- Aging care runs on people nobody counts. Family and paid caregivers hold it together.
- In 1930, 1 in 10 farms had power. By 1953, 9 in 10. Co-ops wired what the market would not.
- The same model, for care. Caregivers as worker-owners of their own cooperative.
- Boulder is Node One. It is not yet a national grid. It is an invitation.
- Vimty. An open protocol for community-owned care. vimty.com
Caring for someone now? Start at co-op.care. Want a node in your community? Build the first-meeting sheet.
How it works
- Build the sheet. Pick your city and how many caregivers you have in mind. The page shows the co-op law where you live (US LCA, Netherlands Coöperatie U.A., Germany eG, UK Co-operative Society, Quebec co-op, Japan Workers' Co-operative Act, Australia Co-operatives National Law), a five-step readiness checklist and a 60-minute first-meeting agenda. It is kept on your device.
- Print it or share it. Print one page for a kitchen-table meeting, or copy a link. The sheet rides after the
#, which browsers never send to a server. - Use what works today. Bank neighbor hours on co-op.care/hours, run a family assessment on co-op.care/assess, and write care wishes on caregoals.com.
- Hold the first meeting. The sheet on /start is the agenda. Nothing you type on this site is sent.
Where it stands: co-op.care, a filed Colorado cooperative in Boulder, is the first node. There is no national network yet. The nine pieces page marks which parts run today and which are designed.
What a node can start next
Idealab.ai gives away more than a million business ideas so anyone can start one. We read 13,452 of them and kept the ones a community could own together. Here are eight, each with the tool that runs today, or a plain note where nothing does.
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Idea 9118
A neighborhood care co-op
Paid caregivers and neighbors trading hours, run by the people who live there, with a clinician on call for what neighbors can't do.
Today: Neighbor hours run today at co-op.care.
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Idea 192258
Caregivers become one team
Caregivers already working informally join one cooperative with shared payroll, scheduling and someone to cover a sick day.
Today: The readiness checklist on /start counts toward four caregivers and one organizer.
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Idea 598487
Care for parents whose children moved away
The adult child who lives far away pays for care at home and can see that it happened.
Today: The family file keeps the papers on the family's own phone.
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Idea 513295
A parent childcare co-op
Families take turns watching each other's children with clear rules, emergency contacts and an hour ledger.
Today: Nothing runs for children yet. The hour ledger at co-op.care is built for adult care.
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Idea 512899
Every member decision, on the record
Each proposal, vote and follow-up is written down where every member can see whether it got done.
Today: co-op.care's member ledger is the starting point.
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Idea 18178
Forming a co-op as easily as an LLC
The legal form, bylaws, member shares and filing steps, worked out for where you live.
Today: /start shows the co-op law in seven places, from a US LCA to Japan's Workers' Co-operative Act.
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Idea 12187
A clinic its patients and clinicians own
A small practice that might otherwise close converts to a co-op owned by its patients and clinicians.
Today: Nothing runs for this yet. The nine pieces page shows where primary care would fit.
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Idea 211763
Co-ops that lend each other help
Nearby co-ops share workers, training and equipment so no one of them has to carry everything alone.
Today: There is only one node so far. A first meeting in your city, with the sheet, is how the second one starts.
These are ideas, not services. A node starts with care at home, and the other ideas come after that works.