To those with a passion for conceptual tidiness the whole field of social care must be exceptionally frustrating; within that field community care is perhaps the least tidy corner. A convenient and in some ways useful definition would see community care as a matter of the provision of help, support and protection to others by lay members of societies acting in everyday domestic and occupational settings. It could thus be distinguished from some of the other main froms of social care – institutional care, institutional treatment and community treatment – by both its typical agents and its typical milieux. The agents of community care are unspecialized and the milieux are open; both are socially given rather than administratively constructed. The distinction could be summarized figurately thus: Any such distinction at once makes three things apparent. 1. Community care, even defined in this fairly extreme manner, is not an impossibility. We know of social systems in which effective care is provided by lay persons in socially open settings on a comprehensive and continuous basis. The most remarkable instance is possibly the Japanese tsukiai reported by Dore.