Caring communities as indispensable elements of a caring society

In the past decade the Netherlands has seen major reforms in health- and social care. These reforms envisioned a shift from a social democratic welfare state to a ‘participation society’; people with care and support live at home longer and rely increasingly on their informal network for support. In response to this transformation, we see an increase of citizens initiatives for care, wellbeing and support in the Netherlands. There is a great variety in this growing movement of citizens initiatives, or caring communities. They vary in target groups, activities, organization and goals. In order to get a better image of this movement, their impact and the challenges they face in collaborating with the Dutch care system, Vilans and the Dutch umbrella organization of citizens initiatives (NLZVE) bundled their forces in a variety of research projects. In one of those projects a ‘Monitor on the Movement of Caring Communities’ was developed. This gave us insight in the activities, goals, partners and bottlenecks of these initiatives and initiated new participatory action research projects. If caring communities are to be part of a caring society they will have to relate to other parties in the society like local government, care- and wellbeing services. Our current project investigates what helps and what hinders in this collaboration. We use an ethnographic and action-based approach to discover what lessons are to be learned and spread to other communities, to enhance the movement towards a caring society. Our primary target audience consists of professionals and citizens involved in Caring Communities and professionals in various healthcare organizations who are collaborating with Caring communities. But anybody interested in the role of citizen initiatives in the movement towards a caring society and sustainable health care is welcome to participate. The interactive workshop will be facilitated by Femke de Wit, expert advisor and Sander Merkus, senior researcher, both working at Vilans. After a 20-minute introduction of our findings, illustrated by examples from the communities involved in this project, participants will be set to work in small groups. They will be asked to create a visualization of a caring society: which parties are to be present in an ideal future and how are they connected to each other? The next question is: from where we are now, what would be the most energizing, constructive next step towards this ideal? Since participants will be coming from different counties and contexts, we expect al lively and inspiring sharing of thoughts, experiences and ideas. Key learnings for participants are that for the movement towards a caring society, the connection between caring communities and professional health care organizations is of great importance. This societal change requires energy and enthusiasm. By closing this session through asking participants to vote for the idea they found most inspiring in this session, we emphasize that creative innovative energy is necessary for this transformation.