When Karen Hodgson (pictured above) walks into her 19-bed aged care facility in Coleambally, a small town in the Riverina region of New South Wales, she doesn’t just see residents and staff – she sees a community fighting to survive.

Like many small, aged care providers across Australia, Karen’s facility, Cypress View Lodge, has been operating at a financial loss for the past two years.

“We can’t keep doing this forever,” she says frankly. “If I hadn’t made the connections I have now – if we weren’t about to launch this project – I’d still be fighting this battle alone.”

That project is a shared services cooperative – a grass