Our Programs
Our goal is to provide families with relief and support when a disaster or crisis occurs. We do this through two primary programs:
- Emergency Child Care Volunteer Program
- Child Care PTO Work Program
Programs
Helping Families in Crisis
Preparing for a Crisis
Emergency Child Care Volunteer Program
Emergency Child Care Volunteer Program deploys vetted child care volunteers directly to the family when a crisis occurs.
Disasters are upsetting experiences for everyone involved, but especially for children. Disasters can leave children feeling frightened, confused, and insecure. Children may respond to disaster by demonstrating fears, sadness or behavioral problems. Younger children may return to earlier behavior patterns, such as bedwetting, sleep problems and separation anxiety. Older children may also display anger, aggression, school problems or withdrawal.
With so many natural disasters occurring today, and now the increase in school shootings, children are seeing and experiencing things they shouldn’t have to — being evacuated, seeing injured or dying people or animals, losing their home and belongings, losing immediate access to basic needs, being injured themselves, and feeling that their own lives are threatened.
Children and families also suffer from post-disaster ongoing stress which includes transitional housing, living in shelters or hotels, losing contact with their friends and neighbors, losing things that are important to them, parental job loss, and the financial costs of reestablishing their previous living conditions.
While the burden of all of this is overwhelming for families, we can help children and families better cope when we provide them with social support systems such as free immediate child care when they need it most.
Advocating for PTO Child Care Leave
Child Care PTO Work Program
Emergency Child Care PTO Program is paid time off that employers allow to support working parents who cannot bring their children to child care due to illness or a crisis. This PTO benefit is in addition to regular PTO.
Many employees with children must frequently take time away from work to deal with emergencies and other family conflicts. This stress is hitting employees hard. Balancing work demands with responsibilities at home can cause working parents to lose focus at work and reconsider career aspirations.
“It feels like I am constantly dealing with child care issues and it’s always affecting my work schedule. My kids are always sick, or there’s a snow day, or teacher day, or the nanny calls in sick, it’s constant! I’m worried about being fired, treated differently, and always feeling behind with tasks and work projects. This program is an invaluable resource for families! I wish all companies provided this!
From absences at meetings, missed deadlines, no shows, family distractions, and a reduction of billable hours, the loss of productivity is affecting employers and employees hard.
Emergency Child Care PTO Program allows the employees to take PTO specifically to deal with child care. Whether it’s staying home with a sick baby, a child care crisis, or driving to urgent care, families need paid time off to care for their children. By ensuring employees have 3-5 days of child care PTO to mitigate an unexpected crisis, employers can ensure that disruptions on the home front don’t lead to future lost productivity in the workplace.
Partner with Us
Join us in bringing emergency child care to families in crisis. Nearly 2.5 million Americans had to leave their homes because of 28 weather and climate-related disasters in 2023. Nearly 30% of individuals injured in these disasters were children.
On a global level, weather-related disasters caused 43.1 million internal displacements of children in 44 countries over a six-year period (2016 and 2021) – approximately 20,000 child displacements a day – according to UNICEF.