Originating in 1985 in a gritty South Bronx office - one that looked unnervingly like it belonged to a private detective on the skids - the Cooperative Health Care Network now links three profitable home health care cooperative sin the inner cities of the South Bronx, Philadelphia, and Boston. This federation of employee-owned businesses stands as a rather rate exception to a long and frustrating history of community-based enterprise creation. Together, these three cooperatives now employ more than 500 paraprofessional home care aides, nearly all of whom are African American and Latina women. Of these more than 400 were formerly dependent upon public assistance.