The Tribe project is building a digital platform that connects people needing care and support with local, community-based providers, bypassing traditional care agencies. This matters because the current care system is fragmented, expensive, and often fails to match people with the right support. Unpaid carers and older adults frequently struggle to find flexible, personalised help, while care workers are undervalued and overstretched. The project targets areas of highest inequality, where these problems are most acute. If successful, Tribe could transform how care is delivered. It would create high-quality local employment, reduce overall care costs, and improve health outcomes for older people and unpaid carers. The model blends technology with community action, allowing micro-providers—neighbours, local groups, small organisations—to become central to care, rather than undervalued assets. A quality-assurance framework aims to build trust among commissioners, providers, and users. The ultimate goal is to replace rigid care “packages” with dynamic, flexible solutions that work around the citizen, challenging the culture of an industry that often treats care as a commodity rather than a relationship.
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The mission of the Tribe project is to directly address inequalities in local and national care and community support. Tribe represents a unique opportunity for collaboration between the most radical developers, providers and validators of advanced digital innovation and experts, innovators and proven community-centred drivers of social action models of care and support. This ground-breaking asset-based approach, co-designed with and validated by users and delivered through a combination of technology and people-power, will create new scale for the most personalised service delivery models by identifying local needs, mapping to an existing spectrum of care and support services, accelerating recruitment and training of care providers and delivering an assured skills and standards framework. Tribe targets the upskilling and development of community assets and the creation of connections between people seeking and people offering support, investing in areas of greatest need and highest inequality. Tribe's benefits include the creation of high quality employment, alignment of demand and supply of care and support services, improved health and wellbeing outcomes for older people and unpaid carers and an overall reduction in care costs. Tribe's novel model of service delivery will be rigorously quality-assured, engendering trust for commissioners, providers and users. The Tribe model will change the conversation regarding care, replacing traditional care 'packages' with dynamic, flexible and sustainable solutions to people's needs, blending local community and statutory services that work around the citizen. Tribe will challenge the culture of the existing care industry through a ground-breaking technology-enabled model that sees care micro-providers as community champions central to citizens' wellbeing and not as undervalued and overstretched assets.
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