About Care Hub

My name is Emma Charnley, and I've spent over 30 years working directly with people with learning disabilities — as a support worker, a teaching assistant, and a positive behaviour coach. I've worked with children, young people, and adults, supporting them in schools, in the community, and in their homes. That work has shaped everything about how I see care — what it means to do it well, and what it means when the right support simply isn't there.

Alongside my professional life, I've also been a family carer. I know what it's like to sit on the other side — to love someone who needs support, to worry about whether the right person will show up, and to feel the weight of responsibility that never quite switches off. That dual experience — professional carer and family carer — is the foundation everything here is built on.

The spark for Care Hub came while working at a special school in Ipswich, where many of my colleagues were also direct payment carers. We naturally looked out for one another — sharing advice and building something that felt less like a workforce and more like a real community. That spirit led to the creation of the Carer's Hub Facebook group, a space where carers could connect and support each other beyond the school gates.

Care Hub is the next step in that journey — a dedicated platform that brings the best of that community spirit to carers and families across the whole of the UK. Not a tech product built from the outside looking in, but something grown from decades of lived and professional experience, built by someone who has been both the carer and the family member who needed one.