THUNDER BAY – A local brewery’s decision to launch its own daycare centre, as workers struggled to find child care during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been a game-changer for employees.
The Sleeping Giant Brewing Co. launched an unlicensed child care centre in September, in an event space just down the road from its Macdonell Street headquarters. Known as the Barrel House, it had been sitting unused during the pandemic.
It became obvious in the spring that many young families were being stretched to the limit, said co-owner Andrea Mulligan, as COVID-19 closed schools and daycares and limited access to family support networks.
Access to quality child care was already a major issue before the pandemic, Mulligan said when the brewery announced the launch of the Sleeping Giant Child Care Centre in September.
“There’s a critical need for child care in Thunder Bay, with some daycares posting waitlists of 800 kids or more – it’s definitely a massive socio-economic crisis.”
“With COVID-19 and not being able to mix children, it became even more [so], and a lot of our employees were struggling,” she recently explained.
A number of brewery employees considered taking leaves or reducing their hours in the face of limited child care options.
Brand experience manager Sachiko Brayshaw was one of them. The new mother was left scrambling when the pandemic scuttled plans for extended family to care for her young son, as she returned to work after parental leave and a brief pandemic layoff in mid-2020.
“If the brewery didn’t open a daycare, I wouldn’t be able to work full-time,” she said, “which would affect my household, because we need that second income.”
Mulligan, who has worked in early education for over 20 years, convened a meeting of brewery staff with young children to float the idea over the summer.
“We always say, everything’s worth a conversation, and that’s exactly how [it] started,” she said. “It seemed like such a cockamamie idea, but here we are.”
“We decided even if one person needed it, we were going to do it. As it turned out, there were several families who utilized it right off the bat. Immediately we were able to [take] at least one huge stressor off of people’s shoulders.”
The centre currently hosts the children of a handful of brewery employees, but hopes to expand once it's licensed, which could happen later this year. It already has a small waitlist.
“We’re looking at [making it] as big as we can, but we don’t know what that looks like yet,” Mulligan said. “Even if we can assist five other families, it makes a big difference in some people’s lives. We’re excited to be able to do that.”
The project is not a money-maker, she said, but brings benefits to employees that also ultimately help the business.
“Having our employees be able to drop their kids off literally two doors down and go to work knowing their children are being well cared for will hopefully contribute to productivity and morale,” she said.
For Brayshaw, the launch of the daycare is a great example of how workplaces can support employees.
“When I’ve talked to some of my girlfriends who have children and tell them what my situation is here and how it’s working out for us… I do think that more businesses should do something like this,” she said.
“I feel they just want to help us and make our lives as easy as possible. I think ultimately it’s so we’re happy at work – and I am.”
Having access to the daycare made returning to work with a young child during the pandemic manageable, Brayshaw said, but would have been a game-changer even under normal circumstances.
“To be able to pretty much just bring my boy to work with me and pick him up as I leave – the convenience is amazing, but honestly, everything about it has just made my life a lot easier,” she said.
The daycare is part of a larger effort to foster a workplace friendly to women in a traditionally male-dominated industry, Mulligan said, noting the brewery's staff is roughly gender-balanced.
“I’d never want to downplay the effects [of COVID-19] on men,” she said. “But for sure, women usually take on a majority role in parenting, even while managing careers. Statistics are showing during COVID-19, women are oftentimes the ones who have to give up their place in the workforce to stay at home.”
Reports from Statistics Canada and the Royal Bank found women have been disproportionately impacted by pandemic-induced job losses, with childcare issues a major contributing factor.
Beyond its effects on Brayshaw's work-life balance, access to daycare has been a boon for her son's development. The pandemic has robbed him of many of the usual opportunities to mingle with children his age.
“If he wasn’t going to daycare, he’d be missing out on a lot of things,” she said. “He'd never even had a sleepover away from us, and he was 18 months old. We can’t take him swimming, we can’t take him to gymnastics. There’s no other way for him to socialize.”
Seeing that kind of transformational impact cemented the brewery’s decision to make the daycare a permanent fixture, Mulligan said.
“At first we thought, maybe this is going to be a year-or-two thing,” she said. “But as we see our families settling in, building relationships, we realized there’s something really special happening, and we want to preserve that.”
“We have this joy and this life now that’s attached to the brewery.”
