Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: childcare in cohousing

[Wilhelmus Schreurs (willie]

On Tue, 2 May 1995 Eikeer [at] aol.com wrote:

> If your community provides child care for the kids, I'm interested in the
> thought processes that your community went through in making the decision to
> provide child care. 

        <Lots of questions ... snip, snip>

>   Maybe a lot of this can be more
> informal than I am imagining.   We are in the planning stages and are
> considering space needs for the common house and budget needs. Thanks for
> your ideas!!

        We at Greyrock Commons just recently thought about this as part 
of our Common House design process.  After investigating the requirements 
for licensing, we decided not to go to the effort and expense of building 
a childcare space to meet all these requirements.  To quote from our 
Decision Log: "Space dedicated solely to childcare will NOT be built 
into the Common House.  Rather, a room will be built that can accommodate 
a variety of uses.  One anticipated use is as a "base" for community 
baby-sitting such as after-school care for community children.  Othe 
anticipated uses include meetings, project space, informal classes.  The 
romp room WILL be included as initially planned."

        We will still obviously do "childcare" in the broad sense of the 
term, just not formal, licensed, "for-pay" childcare.  Groups of parents 
can arrange among themselves to swap child-minding duties, or hire a 
baby-sitter to take care of a small group of kids in much the same way as 
we now do during our many planning meetings.

        Speaking of which, the meetings go on but we're getting 
closer.  Groundbreaking will be in two weeks!! 

  /\                     Willie Schreurs                      /\
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