Samenvatting

This article focusses on small-scale community-based care initiatives developed by citizens in small villages in rural areas in the Netherlands, with special attention to some interesting case studies in the North and South of the country. These initiatives will be contextualized. First, the demographic processes impacting the Dutch care and welfare domain will be discussed in more detail (chapter 1). Subsequently, chapter 2 will focus on citizens’ initiatives, attempting to put them in a broader theoretical framework using theories on voluntary engagement, social cohesion, and a line of reasoning from social capital theory. Finally, in chapter 3, these findings will be used to describe and discuss small-scale community-based care initiatives in the Netherlands in general with a specific focus on two relatively new types of small-scale initiatives built around a social support worker.