The Search for Child Care on the Olympic Peninsula, Part 1
Hello Peninsula, Goodbye Career
Written By Kim Davies Lohman, Peninsulas Early Childhood Coalition
I’ve reached a milestone! This isn’t about turning 40 this week. More importantly, it’s that my son is newly in an all-day preschool on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula! Goodbye 10pm - 2am work windows! Access to child care makes my life so much better.
The backstory:
My career is important to me. Before kids I often worked 50+ hours a week, with business trips across multiple continents. At one point I feared that I might hit a career ceiling without an MBA, so I took out a six-figure loan to study Social Entrepreneurship. It was a big loan, but I was passionate about making an impact with my work, and betting on myself felt like a safe bet. An MBA could allow me to break into strategy consulting and increase my earning potential. However, this assumed I could continue working full-time as a mother, something often not possible in a child care desert.
A few years after graduate school my husband and I bought our first house in Port Angeles. Port Angeles was our favorite vacation spot at the base of the Olympic National Park- why not make vacation a reality? Port Angeles housing prices are much lower than prices in Seattle. And daycare rates appeared to be a third of the cost of child care in Seattle! “What a great place for remote work!”, we innocently thought!
Unfortunately, the ability for parents to work full-time was not realistic and work requires access to child care. The few child care options I thought were safe for my children had a very long waitlist. The only programs available for miles were under the table, unlicensed, and didn’t feel safe.
Enjoying quality time with my son.
When my previous work contract ended, I knew a new employer wouldn’t offer the flexibility I needed to juggle mid-day pickups and drop-offs for child care. So eventually, I stopped applying. As a working professional I have a lot to offer - my unique skill set, 15 years of experience, and passion for impact, but businesses and our community would have to miss out.
I love my kids deeply, but stepping away from the corporate ladder was hard for me. My work was part of my identity. And this holds true for so many others. When spending time with my son at play spaces I’d regularly run into other women who also stepped down from the workforce to watch a child. Not because they planned to step away, but because they didn’t have an option. They couldn’t find child care.
My plan:
With this realization I started Davlo Consulting, and I began taking on projects to increase local access to child care. It felt wrong that so many women were independently at child play spaces across town, each with one kid each, when many wanted to at least be working part-time. The model just didn’t make sense. Couldn’t we pool together to take turns watching each others’ kids? Couldn’t legal local child care solutions be more clear with regulations and better support rural low volume solutions? How is there such demand for programs, but so few openings? Our child care system is broken in many ways, and with that our entire community suffers.
One night, I started brainstorming child care solutions that might help our community and I quickly had 22 ideas. I began to dig into my top idea, building an app to aggregate family needs, communication, and waitlists across programs. (I’m open to talking to funders on this sustainable marketplace idea, as it needs to happen, with or without me!) I quickly found that I was full of ideas that improve a wide range of bottlenecks or levers for change, but I had to admit that I was solving a problem that I didn’t fully understand. I needed to first lean into the child care access space to learn about the ins and outs of family and provider needs, business model issues, and how advocacy works.
I joined a local Clallam County task force at Prevention Works!, and when their leadership was turning over, I was asked to lead it. Through this work I met the Peninsula Early Childhood Coalition (PECC), and they needed a Data Collection Lead to learn more about local family and provider needs. My data collection work with PECC is how I was introduced to the statewide network of Washington Communities for Children (WCFC). With PECC and WCFC, I led the facilitation of a regional early learning and child care plan and eventually stepped into regional leadership of the PECC coalition.
What’s next:
I’m pleased to announce a series of WCFC blogs in June. In the coming weeks I’ll share my learnings from my child care journey, including parent and provider assumptions I got wrong, advocating for child care, and how we’re all in this child care battle together.