I haven’t been posting much lately, partly because we haven’t done too many free or new things, but also because we’ve been busy. Among other things I’ve been raising money for the daycare with other parents.
My kids go to a new daycare, it was founded only a year ago by the municipality. When my children, and most of the other kids – and most of the staff – started in August, we realised that the facilities in the newly renovated building were clean and nice, but there was a lot missing. There was for example less than 10 books, which definitively is too little in a daycare representing a minority language and 36 children. Not that kids otherwise need all the materia, especially when they have such lovely and inventive carers – the carers definitively are the most important ones to make it work, and we could not have been luckier. But us parents wanted to give our children and their staff more opportunities, so we got together and founded a parents association. And then we listed together with the staff what they would like to have there.
The staff also listened to us parents: My daughter has been repeatedly telling me she’d like to dance again, like she did the year before daycare. I’d love to let her, but she is so tired in the evenings that there is no way I’ll cramp some more programme into her day (not that I really would like to have one more schedule to keep either…). So I suggested to the parents and the daycare staff that we’d apply for money to hire a dance teacher (to be more exact, her old dance teacher, who is superb with kids) to visit the daycare. As the daycare puts an emphasis on physical activity, they all thought it was a great idea.
So lately, instead of blogging, I’ve been writing applications to various funds. Not just for the dancing but also for books, theatre, skis, trikes and bikes, slides etc. There is an easy way to find a number of funds, what they distribute money for and due dates for the applications: fyrk.fi . The catch is, for many of them, you need to know Swedish (Fyrk is Swedish for money/coins).
I’m surprised to see that we have already developed our own community with a great cohesion: we organised a Winter Action, which we threw together within a month. I think it was a great success as we had 11 families organising the event and about 25 of the children present on the day! And we had fun! A bonus was, that after all arrangements had been paid, the association even ended up with a few hundred euros we haven’t earmarked for anything. Maybe next it is time to treat the parents with some wine and cheese?
How does it work with your daycare, is there an active parents associations? Are you a part of it? What does it do? How do you raise money? And what do you wish the daycare provides your children with?
Free But Fun 
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Come to think of it, they don’t do many fundraisers at our school, neither the associated church. They do fundraising drives every so often where they ask for donations for a particular purpose and I guess they must do okay! There have been a couple of things but not that many. Your group sounds very active – well done and it’s not wonder you haven’t had time for blogging!
…but I’ll be back soon 🙂
Oh good! I enjoy seeing your posts. 🙂
I wish you success in getting more funds. I am sure your kids will be so proud of you to help get the day care well equipped. Over here we do fund raising through applying to organizations too. We hold carnivals and get sponsors. We hold car rally, gala dinner and selling souvenirs too. It’s mainly activities to have fun and raise money at the same time.
Sounds like pretty good ones for having fun as well!
That is fantastic. When Alex was in daycare I went in a couple of times and did cooking classes with the kids. It was a lot if fun for all involved. Another parent was a yoga teacher who also went in and did a few classes. I do miss that part of parenting…the boys are too big now
Wow, you did cooking with a bunch of kids?! I may need to work on my patience before I do that… But seriously, that sounds great! And your example makes me realise that we never thought of the possibility of having parents among us who could offer good classes for the kids… The closest we got was a mum, a nurse, who offered to give a first aid course to the parents. Well, there is still time!
Thanks for the idea!
No worries, you’d be surprised how well they do with ‘cooking’ in the daycare environment, they concentrated and wanted to please their carers. Little thinks like threading fruit and marshmallows on skewers and then dipping in chocolate and rolling In Coconut…