How it works The money Boulder The book The thesis Join as caregiver Found your co-op
The engine for the new care economy

The engine for the new care economy — built by communities and you.

Found your family's care co-op in 10 minutes. Earn a floor of care Hours. Join a federation that pays caregivers like owners — because they are.

Found your co-op How UBCI works

The money

You may already qualify to be paid to care for your family.

Public programs already fund family caregiving. The take rate is what's broken. A co-op fixes the take rate.

Medicaid · self-direction

Get paid to care for your own family

In self-direction programs, family caregivers are paid for the hours they already give. Routed through the co-op, the admin take is 8–15% — not the 40–50% a staffing agency keeps.

$22–27/ hour, to the caregiver

Medicare Advantage · in-home

Benefits you're owed, actually delivered

Many plans now cover in-home support, respite, and supplemental care. We deliver and navigate them — so the benefit becomes real hours of help instead of a line item nobody claims.

$0to navigate what you already have

VA · veteran directed care

Stipends for the family who shows up

Veteran Directed Care and the caregiver stipend pay families to keep a veteran home and well. The co-op handles the paperwork so the stipend reaches the caregiver, on time.

VDC+ caregiver stipend, managed for you

Same public dollar. More of it reaches your kitchen.

How it works

Three steps to a floor of care.

No application, no waitlist, no means test. You found it — and it accrues.

Found your Hearth

Name your household — related or chosen, under one roof or scattered. Solo is welcome.

1–20 people

Keep five promises

The covenant: directives current, prevention attested, proxy named, home safe, one mutual-aid pledge.

the covenant

Your floor accrues in Hours

Care Hours mint to your ledger and keep arriving while standing holds. Spend, pool, or send them.

denominated in Hours

Two Marions

Two caregivers. Same work. Different deed.

Marion has cared for her mother for three years. Here's the same week, on two different rails.

M
Marion, on the platform
gig care app
  • The app keeps 35¢ of every dollar she earns.
  • Her ratings, hours, and reputation live inside an account she can't take with her.
  • If the algorithm changes, her income changes — and no one to ask why.
35%taken off the top · she owns nothing
M
Marion, in the co-op
marion.coop.care
  • The co-op keeps 8¢ — the rest reaches her kitchen.
  • She owns the rails: her ledger, her record, her Hours — portable across the federation.
  • The ratio that backs her Hours is set by member vote — she's an owner, not a user.
8%administered · she owns the rails

The robots are the same. The deed is the difference.

Want to be Marion in the co-op? Apply to join the Boulder cohort →

The pilot

It starts in Boulder.

We're founding the first 50 Hearths where the rails can be proven end to end — in a region where Medicare's payment model already rewards keeping people well at home, and where the hospital conversation is building name by name.

50
founding Hearths — the first cohort
BCH
Boulder Community Health — the petition
TEAM
a mandated-model region
Join the Boulder pilot
In the community · Summer 2026 We're in the room — co-op.care is part of Boulder's older-adult community conversations at the East Age Well Center. The Boulder petition
The argument
CLICKHERE
How AI Ends the Digital Economy and Begins the Human One
SolvingHealth · co-op.care

The book

Why the engine had to be built this way.

The same automation that hollowed out the digital economy can fund a human one — if the people who give care own the rails it runs on. That's the case the book makes, and the system this site runs on.

"We don't own the cars. We make the engine."

Read chapter one

The new care economy

Found your co-op

Found your co-op

Your family has been a care co-op all along. It just never had a ledger.