Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/family-day-care-services-our-great-grandmothers-quilt----ontario-canada/5018632/
It all began in a stately house on an acre of donated land with 30 orphaned children and a few matrons in 1851. Until old enough to go into household service or a trade, these children of misfortune were protected and cared for by benevolent Torontonians known collectively as the Orphan’s Home and Female Aid Society. It was a time when the scourge of cholera, not reading readiness, determined a child’s fate.Today, we are known as Family Day Care Services �" one of the largest nonprofit providers of licensed home and centre-based child care programs in the Greater Toronto Area with 400 staff serving more than 4,000 children and their families. We are also the lead agency for five Ontario Early Years Centres which are family development centres operated in partnership with the Government of Ontario. Like an heirloom quilt, our organization was created in another time but continues to be of value and service to successive generations of children, parents, grandparents, and caregivers.
The centre of our quilt has always been the child and family. Each program or service is a square positioned and balanced to form a whole, the sum of what we know about healthy child development. Each ...