PLENA Care & Companionship Protocol
Receipt grammar for the long-arc human commitments that don't fit into marriage law — long-term caregiving relationships, chosen family, lifelong friendships, mutual-aid commitments. Verified caregiver-recipient identity, ongoing care log, healthcare proxy designations, and end-of-life wishes between non-married parties.
Opening problem
A woman has cared for her elderly neighbour for fifteen years. She is not a family member, not a spouse, not a hired professional. She has cooked meals, managed medications, attended doctors' appointments, and held the night vigils. When the neighbour is hospitalised with capacity loss, the hospital asks for the next of kin. The biological family — distant, estranged, geographically remote — appears. The woman who actually provided the care has no recognised standing.
A man's lifelong friend, with whom he has shared a household for thirty years without a romantic or legal partnership, is the only person who knows his wishes about end-of-life care. When the moment comes, the friend has no legal authority to act, and the hospital follows the default decisional chain to a brother the patient hasn't seen in twenty years.
A group of friends has run a mutual-aid network for two decades — when one is unemployed, the others cover the rent; when one is sick, the others bring meals; when one's child needs childcare, the others rotate. None of this is contractual. None of it is visible to the institutions that act on the assumption of nuclear family.
In each case, the actual relational reality — who actually cared, who actually knew the wishes, who actually formed the chosen family — is invisible to the institutions whose decisions ride on it. Marriage law was the historical mechanism by which long-arc human commitments were rendered legible to institutions. That mechanism doesn't cover most of the actual long-arc human commitments that real lives are built on.
PLENA Care & Companionship Protocol records these commitments in a form that allows the actual caregivers, chosen family, and mutual-aid networks to be visible to the institutions that need to act on the relationship — hospitals, courts, immigration authorities, social services, employers — without requiring those relationships to be assimilated into marriage law.
Four-layer architecture, applied to care and companionship
The four-layer commitment-protocol architecture from Beyond the Will, adapted to the structural shape of caregiving and chosen-family commitments.
1. Identity & capacity attestation
Verified identity binding for the caregiver, the care recipient, and any third party named in a proxy, guardian, or decision-maker role. Contemporaneous capacity attestation at the moment the commitment is formed — that the care recipient was capable of designating the caregiver as a chosen-family member, healthcare proxy, or end-of-life decision-maker.
2. Intent & the parties to whom commitment extends
What kind of relationship — caregiver, chosen family, lifelong companion, mutual-aid partner, designated healthcare proxy. What the commitment covers: financial support, physical care, decision-making authority, end-of-life wishes, post-death obligations. Which institutions the commitment is intended to be presentable to.
3. Relational graph (rather than asset graph)
The relational network in which the caregiving sits: other caregivers, biological family, prior healthcare proxies, chosen-family members, mutual-aid network members. The commitment doesn't replace these — it documents the actual care reality so that institutions can see who is actually doing what.
4. Versioning, trigger, custody
Versioning across the life of the relationship: care begins, intensifies, transitions to a different caregiver, ends. Triggers: hospitalisation, capacity loss, hospice transition, death, post-death obligations. Custodial chain — who holds the records, who can release them to the hospital or court, on whose authority.
Five workflows the protocol covers
Each workflow produces a sealed designation, a contemporaneous care log, refresh discipline across the life of the relationship, and a multilingual handover packet calibrated to the institutions that may later need to act on the record.
Long-term caregiving designation
For caregivers — paid or unpaid — providing sustained care to a non-family-member care recipient. Captures the caregiver-recipient relationship at formation, then maintains an ongoing care log that documents the actual care provided. Critical for hospital admissions, healthcare-proxy claims, and end-of-life decisions where the caregiver may need to demonstrate standing.
- Verified identity binding for caregiver and recipient
- Contemporaneous capacity attestation: the recipient was capable of designating the caregiver
- Initial scope-of-care declaration
- Ongoing care log with refresh discipline (monthly or per-significant-event)
Chosen-family designation
For relationships that are functionally family but not legally or biologically so — lifelong friends, partners outside marriage, household members across years, the long-arc community ties that real lives are built on. Captures the chosen-family relationship in a form that hospitals, courts, immigration authorities, and social-service institutions can recognise even when their default templates assume biological family.
- Mutual declaration of chosen-family relationship
- Scope of the designation: visiting rights, decision-making authority, post-death obligations, ceremonial standing
- Annual refresh receipt confirming the relationship continues
- Material-change updates: cohabitation status, named-proxy upgrade, addition of further chosen family
Healthcare-proxy designation between non-married parties
For naming a healthcare proxy, advance-directive holder, or surrogate decision-maker outside the marital and biological-family defaults. Closely related to but distinct from the Healthcare & End-of-Life Protocol: this workflow focuses on the relational designation; the Healthcare & End-of-Life Protocol carries the substantive content of the directives themselves.
- Verified identity binding for principal and proxy
- Capacity attestation for the principal at the moment of designation
- Scope of authority granted to the proxy
- Cross-reference to the Healthcare & End-of-Life Protocol directive itself, where one exists
Mutual-aid commitment
For groups that have functioned as mutual-aid networks over years — friend groups, faith communities, neighbourhood networks, online communities-of-care — and want to record the commitment in a form that survives the life of the network. Useful when one member becomes ill, faces a crisis, or dies, and the network's standing to act needs to be visible to the receiving institutions.
- Network member roster with verified identities
- Scope of mutual-aid commitment (financial, physical, decision-making, post-loss)
- Annual refresh receipts and acknowledgement of member changes
- Per-event activation receipts when the network acts on behalf of a member
End-of-life wishes between non-married parties
For documenting end-of-life wishes that the actual chosen-family or caregiver — rather than a distant biological relative — is intended to act on. The substantive end-of-life content lives in the Healthcare & End-of-Life Protocol; this workflow records the relational standing of the non-married party who is intended to act on those wishes.
- Standing declaration: who the principal designates to be present, consulted, and authorised at end of life
- Contemporaneous attestation of capacity at the moment of designation
- Coordination with prior healthcare-proxy designations and advance directives
- Post-death obligations: ceremonial standing, custodial chain for personal effects, communication chain
Integration with existing PLENA infrastructure
VRX-1 receipt grammar
Every Care & Companionship Protocol artifact is a VRX-1 receipt — externally anchored, cryptographically verifiable, multilingual. Hospitals, courts, social-service agencies, and immigration authorities can verify a VRX-1 receipt independently of PLENA's continued existence.
Wallet integration
Care designations, chosen-family declarations, and proxy assignments live in each party's PlenaProof Vault — both the caregiver's and the recipient's. Either party can present a receipt from the Wallet at the moment a hospital, social-service agency, or court asks for proof of standing. The Wallet's custodial discipline applies.
PLENA CONSERVA — long-term archival
Care commitments unfold over years and need to survive multi-decade institutional change. CONSERVA carries the long-term archival layer so that a designation made in 2026 remains presentable in 2046 — at the moment a hospital, hospice, or court actually needs it.
PLENA SIGILLA — cross-border sealing
For diaspora caregiving and cross-border chosen-family situations — a caregiver in one country supporting a recipient in another, a chosen-family designation that needs to be recognised when the recipient is hospitalised abroad, a mutual-aid network whose members are dispersed across jurisdictions — SIGILLA provides the sealing layer that supports apostille-equivalent verification across the legal systems that may need to act on the designation.
Sworn Reviewer Registry
For workflows requiring named human review — capacity attestation at the moment of designation, annual refresh review for ongoing care logs, end-of-life designation review — the Sworn Reviewer Registry provides the accountable pathway. Each review carries the named reviewer, scope, date, and decision.
Refusal Receipts
If a hospital, social-service agency, court, or institutional reviewer declines to recognise the caregiver or chosen-family standing, the Refusal Receipts infrastructure preserves the refusal — who declined, when, on what stated basis. The refusal becomes part of the record the chosen family can later present.
Relationship to other protocols
This protocol sits alongside Marriage & Partnership (for unions inside marriage law), Healthcare & End-of-Life (for the substantive directives this protocol's designees may need to act on), and Beyond the Will (the inheritance architecture that addresses post-death asset transfer).
Why this matters in the AGI era
AI degrades the evidentiary status of relational care. Generated messages, synthesised photographs, and fabricated communication histories make it easy for fraudulent claims of caregiving standing to be brought forward by people who provided no actual care. Hospitals and courts rationally respond by tightening their standards — and the tightening hurts the actual caregivers most, because their care was provided in good faith without contemporaneous defensive documentation.
At the same time, AI increases the demand for relational proof. As automated decision systems propagate into healthcare admissions, social-services eligibility, immigration decisions, and inheritance disputes, the bar for proving "who actually cared for this person" rises. The implicit-knowledge mechanism that allowed a small-town hospital to know who actually showed up does not generalise to the institutional scale at which these decisions now happen.
PLENA Care & Companionship Protocol gives the actual caregivers, chosen family, and mutual-aid networks contemporaneous receipts of the care they provided — so that the actual relational reality remains visible to the institutions that need to act on it, without requiring those relationships to be retrofitted into marriage law or biological-family templates.
What this does not do
Boundary. PlenaProof records verified human commitments. It does not replace marriage law, family law, healthcare law, or any community's internal governance. PlenaProof complements existing legal and institutional infrastructure with receipt grammar that survives the moments these instruments need to be acted on.
More specifically: PlenaProof does not grant legal guardianship, does not establish healthcare-proxy authority where local law does not recognise it, does not adjudicate caregiver standing, does not bind any hospital or court, does not provide family-law or healthcare-law legal advice, does not replace formal advance directives, and does not regulate the conduct of caregiving. PlenaProof produces externally anchored receipts of what was attested, by whom, when, under what circumstances — receipts that hospitals, courts, social-service agencies, and immigration authorities can choose to weigh in their own decision processes.
Distinct from inheritance. This protocol records caregiving and chosen-family commitments. Inheritance proper — the post-death transfer of assets, the executor's mandate, the asset graph and beneficiary structure — is covered separately by the PLENA white paper Beyond the Will. Healthcare directives and dying wishes that this protocol's designees may need to act on live in the Healthcare & End-of-Life Protocol. The three protocols share the four-layer architecture and are designed to interoperate.