Nineteen years ago Cooperation Station began providing quality childcare in our community. The success and longevity of this daycare is due primarily to high-quality, caring staff and secondarily due to invested parents who have participated in the cooperative as volunteer board members or by donating time towards fundraising, cleaning and maintenance of the house on 5th street.
As the cost of living has risen in Cook County it has been increasingly difficult to support a director and childcare providers with a living wage, benefits and necessary training for the demands of this often underappreciated profession.
It felt logical to turn to the Cook County YMCA for help, because their mission is to build a stronger community.
The YMCA magnanimously offered to support the daycare. Our families celebrated that our daycare, which has served a generation of families, would be able to continue to care for Cook County infants, toddlers, preschoolers and school age children.
More explicitly, the YMCA has been willing to provide Cooperation Station with billing and payroll services, maintaining Parent Aware ratings, help with recruiting employees, higher wages and some benefits, access to a sub pool for care providers and support in maintaining programming and the facility. Furthermore, the YMCA is helping Cooperation Station fulfill a long-term goal of operating a nature-based daycare on the lower level of the building, opening in October under the name of Wiggle Worms.
The day that Cooperation Station and the YMCA made an agreement to work together was a day of joy and relief for the Cooperation Station community. With the recent retirement of three in-home, private daycares in Cook County and a current county-wide waitlist numbering around 40 infants and children, we dreaded closing and leaving our 20 families with no available options for childcare.
The YMCA has not acted in a predatory or competitive nature in any way as this partnership has developed, as it was suggested in last week’s article. On the contrary, the YMCA has worked with us through this challenging time of high demands for daycare in our community and ensured that 20 families with working parents can continue to raise their children in Cook County. We are grateful to the YMCA, the advisory board and director, Emily Marshall for their generosity and fulfillment of the mission to serve our community.
Betsy Jorgenson
Cooperation Station Board Chair
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