Childcare

The mandate of the ELCC Transformation Group is to understand what the Early Learning and Child Care (ELCC) system in Manitoba needs to ensure that children and families have high quality child care for all children who need care. While early learning and child care must be universal in approach, additional supports and processes are needed to address and reduce barriers to access. Part of providing quality child care includes ensuring equitable access to all children and families, and to support the Early Childhood Educator workforce.

The work for a national child care program in Canada has spanned decades, with many false starts and setbacks, resulting in generations of families suffering due to a lack of child care and parenting supports. Women work outside the home and mothers can not achieve income and employment equity without child care. Families have been struggling to find and keep quality, affordable and accessible child care in Manitoba, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, access to child care became a crisis. Since the pandemic, even though there has been more funding access to reliable and quality child care, not all families can access that child care. The majority of families continue to sit on waiting lists, and there are not enough trained Early Childhood Educators to support the amount of child care spaces that are being funded by the federal government.

The Reweaving Support Project asserts that it is not enough to reduce the costs for families who currently have licensed child care, but licensed child care must be available for all families who require it, as part of the fabric of society and our social services. Reweaving Support also aims for a comprehensive early learning and child care system that can support the school readiness and parenting support needs of all parents - no matter their income and family type, geographic location, citizenship, ethnicity or cultural heritage. Raising children and parenting are a big part of every culture. Differences in child rearing or parenting philosophy and approach must be considered and understood. Together with community and government, the Reweaving Support Project seeks to follow the Convention on the Rights of the Child and form an understanding of trauma-informed parenting and supports for children and families in Manitoba.

Key Groups	Advocacy, childcare boards and staff, government bodies, academic groups, community solutions (childminding, worker training projects, early years groups)
System Mapping	Who are the partners in providing child care and early learning services? How do they relate and communicate with each other?
Reweaving Support Baseline Change Matrix	This tool shows the current spending and fiscal framework, legal and policy framework, staffing and programming, public education and community engagement and governance framework for child care and early learning.
Historical overview and evolution of our child care and early childhood education systems
Situation Assessment	Drivers of gender based violence – sense making and situation analysis
Change Matrix for a new child care and early learning system	The main work of the project is engaging as many Manitobans as possible with experience in early learning and child care, and collaborating to re-imagine our early learning and child care systems, and to build supports for all parents and families.