Meet Karen Carroll of Cottage Caregivers and ALCA New England Corporate Partner
September 28, 2026 | Corporate Partner Spotlight
What is your name, role and company?
I’m Karen Carroll, President and Chief Operating Officer of Cottage Caregivers, a locally owned, non-medical home care agency headquartered in Hanover, Massachusetts.
I lead our day-to-day operations, which in a company like ours means all functions from caregiver recruiting and retention to client relationships and community partnerships. I came to home care after more than twenty-five years across healthcare, non-profit work, education, and government agencies — all of it in roles built around customer service and staff management. That mix turned out to be exactly the right preparation for this work, because home care for the seniors in our community lives or dies on two things: the quality of the people you hire and the trust you build with the families who let them into their homes.
What geographic area do you cover?
We serve the South Shore and the Greater Boston area. Our hourly care is concentrated across Plymouth and Norfolk counties — Hanover, Norwell, Marshfield, Hingham, Scituate, Cohasset, Duxbury, Pembroke, Plymouth, Weymouth, Braintree, Quincy, Abington, Rockland, Brockton, and the surrounding towns — and extends north and west into Boston, Milton, Brookline, Newton, and Wellesley. For live-in and 24-hour care we can staff throughout Massachusetts, which gives us reach that hourly scheduling doesn’t. If you have a client just outside our hourly footprint, call us anyway. We’d rather have the conversation than have you assume we can’t help.
What services do you provide that would be helpful for care managers and their clients to be aware of?
We provide non-medical in-home care across the full range of intensity, which is what makes us useful to a care manager whose client’s needs are going to change. That includes personal care and companion care on an hourly basis, memory care for clients living with Alzheimer’s or another dementia, post-hospitalization and rehab discharge support, overnight care, and live-in and 24-hour care. Every client starts with a needs assessment detailed care plan, and we can usually complete an in-home assessment within 24 to 48 hours of the first call — which matters when a discharge is moving faster than the family is.
The thing care managers tend to find most valuable is that we can scale a case up or down without a handoff to a different agency. A client who starts at eight hours a week and eventually needs live-in support stays with caregivers they already know, at a point in their life when a new face is the last thing they need. We also keep town-by-town resource guides on our website that care managers are welcome to use with their own clients.
Why did you get into this business?
It started with my own family. My mother-in-law was living with Alzheimer’s, and my father-in-law was determined to care for her at home. We brought in help — and the help was not good. It wasn’t unkind, exactly. It was inconsistent, poorly matched, and never quite the person she needed on the day she needed them. Watching a family work that hard and still not get what they were paying for is what pointed me toward this work.
My career had always been about helping people and supporting teams whose job is helping others — in schools, in non-profits, at the YMCA, and teaching yoga to physically and mentally challenged adults. Home care brought all of it together, and it gave me something specific to fix and put my heart and soul into. I came into this knowing exactly what the bad version looks like from the family’s side of the door. That’s the standard I hold our agency to.
What separates you from others in the field?
Three things, honestly. The first is how we match caregivers. We don’t fill a shift with whoever is available — we match on compatibility, because the relationship between the caregiver and the client is the service. That takes longer on the front end and it’s the reason our clients stay. The second is our nursing foundation: Cottage Caregivers was founded by a South Shore RN with decades of community-based nursing experience, and that clinical judgment is still built into how we assess clients and write care plans. The third is communication. Families and care managers hear from us through regular check-ins and caregiver updates rather than having to chase us for information.
We’ve been serving these communities for over a decade, and we were selected for the Vizient 2024 and 2025 Summits, with our work published in the American Journal of Medical Quality on two occasions. But the measure I’d actually point a care manager to is caregiver retention. In an industry with high turnover, the agencies that keep their caregivers are the ones that can keep a consistent person in your client’s home.
What do you do in your free time?
I live in Marshfield with my husband Brian and our three daughters, so a good amount of my free time belongs to them and to whatever they’re running toward that season. I’m a certified yoga instructor, and I teach yoga to physically and mentally challenged individuals through the MYLE Group — that work has stayed with me for years. I also volunteer with Girls on the Run, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and Flags for Our Veterans. Most of what I enjoy outside of work looks a lot like what I enjoy at work: being around people, and being useful.
Please share your company contact information:
Karen Carroll, President & COO
Cottage Caregivers, LLC
51 Mill Street, Building 8, Hanover, MA 02339
karen@cottagecaregivers.com · Cell: 781-733-3752
Office: 781-430-8599 · cottagecaregivers.com
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