Provincial funds sought for Carberry daycare
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A committee in Carberry has drawn up blueprints for a new daycare to house 55 kids and is applying to the province for grant funding.
Tiny Taters Childcare Co-operative is readying to submit its grant application to the Province of Manitoba for help with a 5,400-square-foot facility that would create space for infants, preschool aged children, and before and after school programs, committee chair Krista Plaisier said.
“We’re just in the process now of completing the grant application to get it into the province,” Plaisier told the Sun in early October.
Carberry Mayor Ray Muirhead said the town will forgive property taxes for the proposed new daycare for 25 years. Daycare has been a big need in the community, he said, with one licensed facility in town that has a waitlist of about 120 people. (File photo)
The facility is planned to be built on land sold for $1 by the Town of Carberry and the Rural Municipality of North Cypress-Langford.
The blueprints for the facility have been drawn up to visualize a completely accessible building with a space that can house eight infants, two preschool rooms that can hold 16 kids each, a before-and-after-school program room that has space for 15 kids, a commercial kitchen, an office for the director, storage space, a janitor’s closet and bathrooms with “tiny toilets.”
The building plan has not been approved by the province, and will be submitted as part of the committee’s upcoming grant application.
Plaisier said there is a huge need for daycare in the community. The existing licensed daycare is full, with a waitlist of about 120 people.
Compounding problems can pop up because of this, she said. If there is no room for the next generation, the community might deteriorate.
“For me and for our committee, daycare is kind of the hub of any community,” Plaisier said. “I think it means a future, right? We have to have childcare in order to keep growing. And towns that don’t grow, eventually … people will move on.”
The total cost for the facility would be roughly $4 million.
The co-operative plans to ask the Province of Manitoba for 60 per cent funding for the daycare project. The remainder of costs would be paid by the co-operative through a mortgage. Costs would be met by fundraising and an ongoing operating fund that the Province of Manitoba supplies to daycares, Plaisier said.
Mayor Ray Muirhead told the Sun that, while the town is not directly behind the wheel for the daycare, it is looking to support the project. The town will help by forgiving property taxes at the site for 25 years, Muirhead said.
The site is planned to be on the north end of Carberry, just west of Highway 5 that comes into town.
The mayor said there may be forward movement sometime as early as this year.
“They’ve really come a long way from the beginning till now,” Muirhead said. “They’ve been doing a really good amount of fundraising. Like, they’re a really organized group.”
The committee is 10 volunteers, and two local councillors, Dallis Olmstead from the RM of North Cypress-Langford, and Mike Sudak from Carberry. Most committee members are parents or grandparents, Plaisier said.
Because the province is currently trying to complete a goal to add 23,000 childcare spaces to Manitoba, and has some money from the federal government, there’s a reasonable chance that some deal can be found, Plaisier said.
“As long as we get our application in before the spaces are filled, we don’t feel that it’ll be any problem,” she said.
The province’s initial goal for the 23,000 spaces was set out in 2021 and aimed to be completed by the end of March 2026. As of February this year, the province reported being about 44 per cent of the way towards the goal.
A spokesperson for the Province of Manitoba told the Sun in early October that it would be too early to comment on the proposal in Carberry, because the grant application had not been submitted yet.
When the application is filed, it will be the first big step for the committee, Plaisier said. There has been movement towards a daycare in Carberry for a few years now, however, the committee was just formed about a year ago, and has been working towards this milestone.
She does not know when the committee will hear back from the province.
The Carberry area committee worked with a co-operative out of Saskatchewan called Co-operatives First to help bring the plans to paper.
» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com