How a Vancouver mom is trying to help solve the daycare crisis
If you’re a parent, then you probably know the challenge of trying to find a spot in a Vancouver daycare.
Ella Dalling, a Vancouver-based entrepreneur and mother of an eight-month-old daughter, Murph, is trying to make this process a bit easier for both parents and daycares.
She’s built Little Scout, a platform where licensed daycares can post listings for spots that parents can browse through to see what’s available — like someone might while searching for a job on a platform like LinkedIn or Indeed.
Dalling said it is like “a daycare directory,” as it has inspection reports and Google reviews listed.
“I can’t create a daycare,” Dalling told Daily Hive. “But I can help hopefully create a solution that makes it a little bit easier and more transparent for parents to apply. And then an easier way for daycares with vacancies to get those spots filled as fast as possible.”
Dalling said that she had been “hearing rumblings” about the daycare shortage prior to having her own daughter.
“As your friends start to have babies, you just hear about how horrible it is and how impossible it is to get childcare. [But] you kind of just always assume, ‘Okay, yeah, sure, but you eventually get off a daycare waitlist’.”
But when she was pregnant with Murph and started looking for daycare and signing onto waitlists, the reality of the daycare shortage sank in. According to the City of Vancouver, just half of Vancouver’s childcare demand is being met, leaving a gap of 6,700 spaces.
“And I was like, ‘This is insane,'” she said.
“If you are a parent and you’ve applied with your kid, you’re not going to get off that wait list probably for a year. And at that point, when they’re searching through their inbox, there’s probably a big disconnect between that six-month-old baby — now she’s actually a year and a half.”
Dalling runs her own marketing business, and returned to work two months post-partum. She said that most places won’t take a baby that young, so she pays her mom to take care of Murph Monday through Thursday.
Little Scout
Through the process of her search for a daycare, she came up with the idea to create Little Scout. She chatted about it with a friend who’s a developer, who built the base of the website.
“And so we walked through it, and then over time, it’s just been iterated, and now it’s just me and him working on it,” she said. “It’s kind of off the side of our desk, but it’s really picking up steam.”
Dalling found daycares by emailing and connecting with them on Facebook, and parents through her own social network and paying out of pocket for advertising.
Little Scout launched last week, and Dalling said they’ve already had their first connection between a daycare and a parent looking for a spot. There are currently around 30 daycare vacancies posted, and Dalling said it has been growing every day.
“You don’t have to make calling daycares like your full-time job as a parent,” she said. “Or the doom of, ‘Can I have another kid because can I get daycare?'” she said. “Honestly, it’s nuts out there.”