Extending our services:
Our new family centers as a way to community building
All three of rainbowtrekkers’ kindergartens are to be expanded into family centers throughout the coming year. In addition to our regular caregiving services, we want to gradually build up an additional free-of-charge program, which is intended to focus in particular on parents and the children’s extended family.
The family centers will offer for example regular after-work parent-child events, grandparent afternoons, the revival of our fathers’ program at the weekend and information events on educational topics. Our family center will also act as a guide for parents from our international community who have moved into town just recently and will provide advice and help if necessary.
With this strategic decision to develop our organization ahead, we are taking on an impetus that we have felt from parents for many years: namely the desire for community building beyond the opening times of the kindergarten and the interest in extended educational exchange.
We are therefore happy and grateful that last month the Council and Administration of the City of Cologne laid the financial basis for the rainbowtrekkers to be able to expand all three kindergarten locations into family centers. Our additional programs will be free of charge and financed from state funds.
Prerequisite for a future recognition as a family center is a long catalogue of criteria, which we want to work through and implement over the coming months (depending on the development of the corona pandemic). We are assuming a gradual rollout phase of one year. We are confident that the complete program will be available in the summer of next year and that we will then be a “Certified Family Center NRW”.
The leadership of the three family centers is taken over by our experienced colleague, Ashley Detray, who has been with the rainbowtrekkers since 2014 and has previously worked in the Bumblebee group in our kindergarten in Junkersdorf. “I think working with parents is incredibly important,” says Ashley, “unfortunately it is often neglected in everyday daycare. We need to see the child more in its entirety and in all its social relationships. I am looking forward to working with all of rainbowtrekkers’ parents. I am pleased that the City of Cologne and the management of rainbowtrekkers are giving the opportunity to build a great community here.”
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