The CASA Team
CASA is the UK's leading employee owned homecare social enterprise, and, with its founder organisation Sunderland Home Care Associates (SHCA), was Social Enterprise Of The Year, 2006. With 4 CASA units in operation, and providing over 7000 hours of care per week, CASA is viewed by the Department of Health and others as a trail-blazer in health/homecare social enterprise franchising and replication.
Established in 2004, CASA is a genuinely strong partnership of organisations and individuals with the right mix of technical skills, experience, and entrepreneurial flair to continue to develop the growing CASA family.
Sunderland Home Care Associates
Established as an employee owned company in 1994 to provide a personal care service in Sunderland under contract to the Local Authority, SHCA now employs over 200 professional and trained carers, and delivers in excess of 4,000 hours of care per week. SHCA has gained a national reputation for the quality of its services, the terms and conditions it offers to its members, and is often asked to contribute to policy seminars and conferences. SHCA has released two co-founders to drive the CASA project forward.
Employee Ownership Association
EOA’s membership comprises some of the most successful employee owned businesses in the UK, including the John Lewis Partnership, Tullis Russell, and Scott Bader. EOA have agreed to release staff resource to advise on structuring the employee owned relationship within each satellite replication unit itself, and between the replication units and the 'hub'.
Economic Partnerships Limited (EPL)
EPL are specialist advisors on social enterprise development. A team with long experience of most aspects of social enterprise, EPL have been involved in government policy development, planned and managed multi-million pound projects, helped establish some of the most successful social enterprises around, written books... and much else besides.
The People Behind CASA
CASA is driven by two founder members of Sunderland Homecare Associates Limited, Margaret Elliott and Shaun Jackson, plus Dr Guy Turnbull of EPL and Dave Wheatcroft.
Margaret Elliott (OBE) has been involved in co-operative development since the 1970s, first as founder member of a worker’s co-operative shop, Little Women, and then in a small Home Care co-operative, Little Women Household Services Ltd. After a stint at the Prince’s Trust and a study visit to care co-operatives in New York, Margaret established Sunderland Home Care Associates in 1994. Margaret’s commitment to participation in the workplace is as strong now as it was when she first learned of this totally different way of working in the early seventies.
Margaret is responsible for day to day management of CASA, service design and development within the replication units, tendering, and support to the unit managers.
Shaun Jackson became involved with SHCA in early 1994, when Margaret Elliott outlined her plans to develop a genuinely democratic home care co-operative. Shaun’s main working role within SHCA has been to co-ordinate the provision of home support packages to enable people to live, and be cared for, in their own home. Throughout this time, Shaun has also served as the Chair of the Board of Directors, which was democratically elected by the members in 1996. Shaun has also carried out consultancy work for Durham Co-operative Development Agency, a health worker in Middlesbrough and Direct Care, a women’s co-operative operating in Darlington.
Shaun’s key Responsibility is to ensure that each CASA unit fully complies with Commission For Social Care Inspection (CSCI) regulations. He also leads on the CASA trouble shooting service.
Dr Guy Turnbull has been involved in the social economy since 1988. In 1995, Guy established Economic Partnerships Limited (EPL), a Northumberland-based social economy research and development consultancy with business partner and friend, Geof Cox. He now works across the UK through EPL as a social economy consultant, specialising in business planning, project management, training, and community economic development research and strategic planning.
Guy’s role in CASA is strategic development and business planning.
David Wheatcroft has been actively involved in employee ownership since the 1980s. It was during the Bus Privatisation Programme in the late Eighties that David (as an existing bus driver) was elected as Worker Director of the newly formed Chesterfield Transport. In his position of Worker Director he was part of the buy-out team that purchased the company from Chesterfield Borough Council which became the first 100% employee owned buy-out in that industry.
In 1992 David was invited to join the Board of the Employee Ownership Association and in 1995 he was awarded their Phillip Mayo Award for Outstanding Contribution to Employee Ownership.
In 2000, David oversaw the transition of Sunderland Home Care Associates from a Co-op to an Employee Owned Company. He did this successfully and has acted as their Employee Ownership advisor and administrator to the present day, where he serves as an Outside Non-Executive Trustee on their Employee Benefit Trust.
David’s role within CASA is to design and implement the employee owned governance structures across the CASA Group.