A new childcare space reached an exciting milestone recently, as the Pebbles to Rocks Childcare Centre held a groundbreaking ceremony Monday morning. The project looks to expand childcare services for the city of Estevan, with crews getting to work soon on the building.
Karolina Tamulaitiene, the executive director for Pebbles to Rocks, talks about the moment and seeing those shovels hit the dirt.
"This was kind of a pinch me moment, I guess in a way, because I've been working towards this for a long time now, and it still all feels surreal, but now that I've seen them actually digging the hole, it's now finally sinking in that it is happening. It was wonderful to see our mayor there and the honorable Lori Carr and some of the city council members, people from the community came to support, that was really, really nice."
The project has been worked on for over two and a half years, with Tamulaitiene saying the community has had problems with childcare availability, which inspired the project.
"I keep hearing from different moms about problems with child care and the shortage of regulated child care. The waiting list for the current daycare centers are so long, at least two years. Then I started looking into it and I learned that we have between 500 to 600 kids on waiting lists between the two daycare centers that we have here, and I thought something has to change.
"We need more regulated child care centers here in town, and even with this one, this one will be 90 spaces. That's the maximum in Saskatchewan that a daycare center can have, and this will barely make a dent, but it will for sure help some families."
Tamulaitiene says she's heard excitement from families as the project has progressed, even if the progress hasn't always been public knowledge.
She talks about some of the initial work that went into deciding how best to bring a new childcare centre to the community.
"A building we looked at to renovate, that building, we were looking at $2.5 million just to bring it up to code. That's all, nothing fancy, just to bring it up to code, and when I started to see numbers like that, I became curious about what it would cost to build a building. Right now, the estimate for the building that will be built on Wellock Road is $2.5 million, and the daycare will own it, whereas the other one would have been a rental property."
In order to have that come to fruition, the project received grants from the Ministry of Education, the City of Estevan, and donations from companies and individuals.
Fundraisers are currently ongoing, with over $1 million needed in fundraising to make the whole project happen.
"We will need more. We will definitely need about $1.5 million, just because all the inventory, furniture, all those things will have to be purchased as well."
To that end, Tamulaitiene says they've set up sponsorship tiers for businesses and individuals to contribute to the building to have that come to Estevan.
Their fundraising efforts are just spinning up as an event is planned to talk about their goals this fall, with some internal discussions this summer.
"We will be hosting an event in October, more details are still to come, we're working through that. We have about 12 volunteers to be our fundraising committee and we will be meeting on July 9th to focus all on fundraising events that we already have in mind, as well as maybe some other ideas, brainstorm more things that we could do.
Tamulaitiene is optimistic that Estevan will come out and support the centre and get the money that's needed to build it.
"I know Estevan's community is a wonderful community, and I haven't seen people come together to support an important cause as much as our community does, so I'm hoping that people will come and support us and help us bring this to the finish line."
So far, larger donations have included $1,337,294 in grant funding from the Ministry of Education, $200,000 total from the Southeast Saskatchewan Economic Partnership and the City of Estevan's Municipal Coal Transition Assistance Program, and $15,000 each from Kingston Midstream and Tundra Oilfield.