A few months ago, a conversation started in Mobilise’s online community of unpaid carers about air fryers. Nothing unusual - it's the kind of thread that begins with someone sharing a ‘quick and easy’ recipe tip and ends up somewhere unexpected.
One carer mentioned she'd love an air fryer but couldn't afford one. Another, whose mother had recently died, had two sitting in her kitchen. She offered one up immediately. The only problem: she was in the North West. The carer who needed it was in Cornwall.
What happened next is hard to engineer and impossible to commission. Between them, a small group of carers worked out a daisy chain of people who happened to be travelling in roughly the right direction - and the air fryer made its way from one end of the country to the other.
Imagine what a formal service could have looked like: referral; assessment; eligibility check; several visits; a procurement process. Months, perhaps, to arrive at the same outcome - if it arrived at all.
But here's the thing: this was never really about the air fryer. It was about someone feeling held and supported by a community of other people who understood what she was going through as a carer.
So often in Adult Social Care, we find the response to somebody’s challenges is a ‘service’. But most problems faced by the UK’s five million+ unpaid carers don't arrive neatly formatted for a service pathway.
A conversation about a partner's changed behaviour, a question about hospital discharge at 11pm, a moment of guilt about not coping - these don't happen on Monday mornings. They happen in the car, in the kitchen, in the spaces between everything else. They are fundamentally non-linear in timing, in nature, and in urgency. Caring for a family member, neighbour or friend is inherently chaotic, unpredictable and… non-linear. So support for carers needs to accommodate a non-linear approach.
That’s why, increasingly, councils are turning to community as an effective way to provide support for unpaid carers.
The counterintuitive truth about scale
We built Mobilise on the belief that carers themselves are the best source of support for other carers. What we didn't fully anticipate was how much better that support would get as the community grew.
This is an important consideration in the current context. Across the country, adult social care services are under sustained pressure - rising demand, increasing complexity of need, and budgets that haven't kept pace with either. Many councils are now facing an uncomfortable question: how do you increase the reach and quality of carer support without increasing the cost of delivering it?
Community will never be the whole answer, but it's a significant part of one. The more carers you bring into a well-designed network, the more capable that network becomes - without a proportional increase in cost or staff time.
When we first launched, the median time for a carer to receive a first response in our community was 77 minutes. Today, across over tens of thousands of posts and comments, that median has dropped to 40 minutes. Last winter - December and January, historically the hardest months - it was 29 minutes.
To put that in context: the benchmark for a high-performing enterprise community - Apple, Microsoft, the big tech platforms - is a median response time of 2 to 4 hours. How fantastic that unpaid carers are beating that by a factor of four, around the clock, peer to peer.
Of course just receiving a ‘response’ doesn’t mean you’ve got a ‘solution’. But, as a carer, it can make all the difference to know that you’re not alone, and to make contact with somebody who ‘gets it’ - especially at 2am.
Nearly 1 in 10 of all interactions in our community happen between 10pm and 5am. When a carer is awake at 2am worrying about a hospital discharge, they're not looking a helpline and receiving a recorded message. They want to connect with someone who ‘gets it’.
With so many services, ‘managing demand’ means finding ways to restrict usage and the cost associated with it to avoid services becoming overwhelmed. Community works in the opposite way - more carers in the network means someone is always there. Speed and scale move in the same direction, not apart.
