Ilkley Community Enterprise is an award-winning, dynamic social enterprise charity with a number of key business operations and services. Our domiciliary care company, Carers and Companions, provides 24/7/365 home and community-based care for elderly people, people with physical or learning disabilities, health conditions and those with other care and support needs. Carers and Companions operates two main services:
i. Elderly and care services, providing bespoke care to clients in their own homes. The vast majority of clients are privately funded or on Direct Payment funding agreements; and
ii. Independent Living Services (ILS), providing support and care to adults with a learning disability, autism and/or other health conditions/disabilities, in their own homes, some in supported independent living settings and in the community. ILS clients are funded via Direct Payment agreements, private funding and exceptionally through local authority contracts.
Carers and Companions is well-established in the local community with an excellent reputation for providing high quality of care and support to clients across Ilkley and the wider Wharfe Valley area. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has rated our care quality as ‘Outstanding’ and we pride ourselves on making a positive, measurable difference to all our clients.
As a social enterprise we are socially driven and commercially minded. We are ‘in business for good’. We reinvest any profits that we make back into the work of the charity. Our values are central to our operations and services: they are ‘can-do’, respect, inclusion, quality, progression and enterprising.
In addition to Carers and Companions, the charity runs Outside the Box, an inclusive community café and provider of education, training and creative services for our learning-disabled client community.
Our innovative approach and success have been widely recognised. For example, the charity won the Social Investment Award, sponsored by Big Society Capital and run by Social Enterprise Yorkshire and Humber, with the judges commenting that we are:
“...a small but mighty organisation with so much passion and enthusiasm to make a real difference for their community”.
