Case studies

The Edge Café in Cambridge provides support to people recovering from substance misuse and those with mental health problems by running recovery groups and providing opportunities for volunteering.

An element of drug and alcohol recovery support has been run from a community library since 2019 in Newcastle.

Gateshead Council run their own in-house monitoring and response centre for all of their housing stock including general needs and specialist housing. This includes approximately 3,000 community alarms in people’s homes in the area – a traditional telecare offer.

Suffolk County Council launched Cassius, their county-wide digital care service in July 2021 delivered in partnership with Alcove and Rethink Partners. This was the culmination of several years of planning and research, the development of a digital care strategy and an extensive procurement process for a digital care partner (paused during Covid-19) that ran for over a year.

Ronan Carolan set up HealthConex, which specialises in recruiting nurses and care staff to the UK and Ireland, and, having seen a wide variety of practice within the industry, he was driven by a desire to recruit ethically and see candidates as clients, not commodities.

The Snowdrop Project is a Sheffield based charity that works with survivors of human trafficking to empower them to recover from their experience.

The Story Buses were initially launched in January 2020. The buses arose from the need to replace the library vehicle fleet and resulted in two Story Buses, named Sam and Nelly by the children, with exciting exterior designs by illustrator Nick Sharratt and interiors with well-designed spaces to sit and read.

Reception Reading Stars is a reading activity to help foster a love of books and reading targeted at parents/carers of children about to enter reception class in September.

The idea of reading to a dog originated in America. Alison Tutill had seen some research carried out by BookTrust and thought it would be something we could offer in libraries.