I think it is important to spend some time reflecting on your accomplishments and challenges periodically and New Years Eve seems like a good time for that so here are my reflections for 2024.
We started 2024 with a handful of dreams, one was to start a forest nursery program that we could one day grow into a full-day licensed forest school program and another big one is to build an accessible washroom for our program and an assortment of smaller goals and aspirations. It's very exciting to reflect that we are well on our way to accomplishing these goals as we now have a licensed, funded, morning forest nursery program that you can read more about in our blog! and we are waiting to get our permit approved to start construction on the washroom.
In order to accomplish our goals we started January 2024 by hiring Alyssa back into our program so that she could partner with Sharon in the Preschool program and Esther could work on licensing the Forest Nursery program. We had been sad to see Alyssa move to another program when she accomplished her ECE II so we were very happy to have her back.
In May we were lucky to attend the Manitoba Nature Summit as a staff team and learn some important lessons to assist us with starting the Forest Nursery program and incorporating more outside time into the overall program.
The educators continue to purchase new items, tidy and rearrange existing furniture to make a cozy, home-like environment in which the children can learn, grow and feel cared for.
It has been a busy year for advocacy- representatives from our Board of Directors made a presentation to the Province advocating for increased operating funding for child care centres in order for programs to be able to keep up with increasing expenses. Corine was invited by Ben Carr to attend an announcement at RRCP about the Canada Wide Early Learning & Child Care program and Corine attended a national conference on the development of early learning and child care system building that was hosted at the U of M.
We had some excellent guests and field trips this year but one of our favorites was this group of drummers who were in town for the Fringe Fest and had everyone dancing, singing, clapping and laughing for a couple of hours this summer! its always great to hear a whole room of children so full of joy!
The kinders graduated to become school agers, a few of the oldest children aged out of the program, and we welcomed some new 3 year olds and a couple school age siblings as is the usual flow of our years.
The school age children participated in an ongoing project where they visited many local businesses and interviewed them about what they do. Sue and Brayden are still working on a way to share the information they gathered.
Sue and Brayden have been active with the Manitoba Child Care Association's School Age Child Care Committee this year and have hosted meetings, practicum students and also did a workshop presentation at the School Age Resource Evening- we are proud that they do such a great job of networking and representing our program!
The Forest Nursery started in September thanks to the team work of Esther, Katie and Tessa and their team of volunteers! We've been blessed with so much support from the Riverview Garden Society, the overarching community, family members, our cultural advisors Alicia Alphonso and her family and all of you. It's truly been a dream so far and we can't wait to see what is next.
In October our amazing Fun-raising Committee planned the social of the year that had folks raving about how much fun it was- and we raised a significant contribution to our Accessible washroom project! Shout out to DJ's Co-op and The Kaptain who had the dance floor packed all night.
In November I travelled to St. John's to attend the Outdoor Play Canada panel discussion on Advancing Licensing of Outdoor Early Learning programs in Canada- like our Forest Nursery program. It was great to meet folks from across Canada who are building programs like ours and working to create a new vision of early learning that does not have to be tied to a building. It will be very interesting to see where this journey takes us.
The Board, the educators and I have also been contributing to the South Osborne Child Care Coalition- a group of neighborhood folks who are working on a new child care program in Lord Roberts that will hopefully create adequate child care for South Osborne in coming years- stay tuned for calls for volunteers and future fundraising and advocacy efforts to help accomplish this exciting goal- it is inspiring to see so many committed community members dedicating volunteer time for this project. RACC is honoured to contribute.
Sadly, Payton and Mary Jane are leaving the program in December. We will be forever grateful for the time that they spent with us and hope they keep in touch! We are happy to add Brittany to the team.
The cherry on 2024 was the Strategic Planning session that the Board and Educators participated in under the leadership of Anne Lindsey who was kind enough to guide us AND a delightful holiday party with extremely generous gifts from the parents that was coordinated by the fun-raising committee!
It was a really great way to finish up a busy year and feel like we are all on the same page, working towards keeping RACC an awesome place for children to learn and grow.
We all feel most thankful to be part of this amazing organization and hope to see it continue to grow and contribute meaningfully to the community.
Thanks for taking the time to reflect with me- what was your favorite part of 2024?
Comments