11/04/2020
It’s been one eventful year! Back in October 2019, we incorporated Maple Leaf Daycare, Preschool & Education Centre with a mission to nurture future global leaders with the Canadian values of equality, respect, safety, peace, and love of nature. We wish we had a crystal ball at the time to know that the year 2020 would confront us as one of the most challenging years of our careers. As we went into construction of the facility, Canada confirmed its first COVID-19 case on Jan 25th. By March 11th, 2020 the World Health Organization had characterized COVID-19 as a global pandemic. While the economic and social fallout from this first global pandemic of the century was unclear, one thing was certain for us – we had to upend our mission to ensure the physical protection of our dear children and educators. Our business priorities shifted from “How will we grow?” to three basic questions:
• “How will we keep our children and educators safe?”
• “What do we want our organization to stand for?”
• “Who do we want to be when we emerge from the worst of this?”
Undeterred by the impacts of COVID-19 on our schedule to open the facility, we continued to move forward with a strong sense of purpose – much deeper than our mission. Finally, we opened the doors of our daycare, preschool and out of school care to the children on Sep 08, 2020. We have adapted our daycare policies to exceed the safety norms set up by the Government and we continue to ramp up our operations while navigating the new normal. While COVID-19 has made it difficult to think beyond the next hour, the next day or the next week, we have been intently focused on our duty of care towards our daycare children, our employees and our North East Calgary community.
Our next biggest priority has been to make sure that the parents of our children are not financially stressed in sending their children to our facility. We want to create equal opportunities for students from all strata of society and make early childhood education affordable to the families in this time of crisis. We continue to ensure that cost of early childhood education is not a barrier to entry for our students and are determined to provide a safe and hygienic place for children as the parents get ready to go back to work. All our shareholders believe that solely prioritizing short-run outcomes of profitability is far less important than a larger sense of purpose for Maple Leaf Daycare, Preschool and Education Centre.
Lastly, we truly believe in the ability of mankind to weather this crisis. Scientists around the world are working day and night to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19 and we will soon emerge out of this crisis. We shall again be on a growth path. If anything, COVID-19 has helped us to raise the bar of early childhood education, and we would like to maintain it going forward. Our aim is to reach as many children as possible and we will start evaluating the growth opportunities in near future. There are more than 60,000 children aged 0 to 4 in our city who don’t have a decent place to go for their early childhood education. We would love to partner with the people who share the same passion as ours in nurturing future global leaders with the Canadian values of equality, respect, safety, peace, and love of nature.
