An Introduction to the Child Care Fund

What are the objectives of the Child Care Fund?

• To help members who have the most difficulty finding or affording high quality child care. This includes members who work irregular hours, need infant care, have children with special needs or require summer care for school age children.
• To create high quality, affordable child care. This includes creating innovative child care services, such as services that meet the needs of shift workers, and making existing quality services available and affordable.
• To work with our allies in the child care community to create high quality, non-profit child care services for postal workers.

 

What is the Child Care Fund used for?

The Fund is used for projects that provide child care services, as well as child care information programs, needs assessments and child care research.

The union has 15 Child Care Fund projects across Canada. Every region has at least one. All projects are community-based, non-profit and accommodate children with special needs. Each project provides at least one of the following services:

• Child care centres that accommodate irregular hours of work.
• Licensed care in the home of a caregiver to accommodate early morning starts, evening or night shifts.
• Short-term emergency child care for members whose child care arrangements break down unexpectedly.
• After school and summer care for school age children.
• Child care information, referral and resources
• A project across Canada and Québec for parents of children or their adult sons and daughters with special needs or disabilities.

 

Who does the Fund cover?

• Members and their dependent children (including children with special needs).
• Members with adult children with disabilities who are dependent on parents for care.
• Members who provide primary financial and residential support for their grandchildren.

 

Can the Fund meet all our members’ needs?

The Child Care Fund has helped some families find affordable, high quality child care. But the truth is, we would need a fund 50 times the size of the one we have to meet the diverse child care needs of all CUPW members.

Setting up work-related child care services is only part of the solution to our child care problems. What we really need is a national child care system like other industrialized countries.

Good child care should not be a privilege for children of wealthy parents or a welfare measure for the children of low income parents. It should be available and affordable to everyone. Unions fought for many of the social programs we value today. Unions have a role to play in ensuring that we have programs like child care in the future.

One of the best ways we can do this is by working with groups that are fighting for a child care system that meets the needs of all parents.

Code Blue for child care is a Canada-wide campaign to build a real pan-Canadian child care system. Their goal is to build a universal, inclusive, comprehensive, high quality, community-based child care system that is accessible and provides early learning and development opportunities for ALL children.