Carers' Common Room | Fauve Alice

Carers’ Common Room was a project I founded and ran which arose from the experiences I had working as a care worker, and the desire for a greater sense collectivity within that sector.

We were open between October 2022 and April 2024 as a space for professional home care and domiciliary care workers to use during the day in between their visits to clients. It was a space designed for and by domiciliary care workers in Brixton, functioning like a staffroom to offer a place for people to come together, where they could access free teas and coffee, facilities to make food and eat in a comfy and relaxing environment giving them an opportunity to rest and save money.

Care work is an industry rife with exploitative practices and heavily reliant on a migrant female workforce who are often not fully aware of their workers’ rights. This means that there is an intensified level of precarity in a job which is already very demanding and underpaid.

Having a collective care worker space for all agency staff and private care workers from across the borough to access allowed people to feel less atomised in their work - to have the ability to process difficult experiences from their working environment with support from peers, and begin to better understand their rights as workers. In the long term we see spaces like this as a resource to push for better working conditions and employment rights and we hope that through this project we can start to build a collective voice, and together rethink and reimagine care work. We do not want to look towards charity models of support but rather seek to create spaces for agency and collectivity.

We also organised a series of workshops and events programmed by users of the space including art therapy sessions, inviting lawyers to talk about UK work law, and a masseuse sharing simple massage and breathing techniques.

Our time in Brixton is coming to an end and we are going through a period of evaluation and reflection. We hope to find a more permanent home by the end of 2024, and also expand the number of locations that we have across the borough and further afield. We are also publishing a record of what we have learnt throughout this period, looking at how much we have achieved and what needs to be learnt from this experience as we move forward.

This project has been, and will continue to be a collective enterprise and has included the generous support of many people including Victor Rios, Anghard Davies, Georgia Battye, Arti Prashar, Samuel Reynolds, Sümer Erek and others. We received funding from Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Necessity and The Social Change Agency all of who were very generous in their support.