Six aides, one bad Tuesday, and a better idea.
In 2019, six home-care aides were driving the same back roads for three different agencies, doing the same tender work for a wage that quietly assumed it wasn't skilled. On one genuinely bad Tuesday — two call-offs, a schedule built by someone who'd never met a single client — they sat down in a church basement and did the arithmetic. The agencies were keeping close to half of what families paid. The people doing the actual caring were keeping the smallest possible say in any of it.
So they built the place they wished they worked for. Haven Care Partners is a cooperative — owned by its caregivers, governed one member and one vote, with the year's surplus shared among the people who earned it instead of wired to an owner three states away.
What that changes, day to day
You don't answer to a manager whose incentive is to bill more hours. You answer to your fellow members, and they answer to you. Schedules get built alongside the people who'll actually drive them. Raises get proposed and voted on in the open. And when something is broken, the person with the power to fix it is usually sitting in the same room.
Why we stay small
We're rooted in the Driftless — Viroqua, Westby, Readstown, and the coulees in between. We aren't trying to get big. We're trying to be the kind of place a good caregiver never has to leave, because when caregivers stay, families get the one thing no agency can honestly promise: the same trusted face, week after week, until the names and the coffee orders and the old stories are all known by heart.