Author Archives: Administrator

Our Summer Schedule

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Happy Summer!!!!   Three important notes about our summer schedule:

  1. We are losing access to our Terry Fox site  all summer as Gledhill School will be under construction.  Our Monday & Friday programs will be held at our Kimbourne site.
  2. We have an agency-wide closure each summer for three weeks.  The closure is July 30th through August 18th.
  3. Our programs are for children birth to SK only.  We ask families to make other programming arrangements for school aged children as we do not admit them to our programs, with the exception of Tuesday evenings and Saturdays.

 

Schedule Updates for May, June, July & August

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No Child Turned Away (NTCA) days have ended for now and we thank our donors for the gift of all those extra play days!  Please donate so we can have more NCTA days in the fall!  Please also leverage any business connections you may have, on our behalf, if you know of any grant or sponsorship opportunities.

For the months of May and June, we’re back to our regular schedule shown below.  There’s yet another schedule change coming up in the summer as Gledhill School is under construction, so our usual Mondays & Fridays at Terry Fox will be offered at Kimbourne instead.

Our Holiday Schedule

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Before we close for the holidays, we want to wish you a joyful and fun time celebrating those meaningful events and traditions enjoyed by you and your loved ones!
Holiday Hours
  • Last day of operation at our Kimbourne site is Saturday, December 23rd, 2017.
  • Kimbourne re-opens on Tuesday, January 2nd.
  • NO CHILD TURNED AWAY DAYS will be extended (thanks to our donors and PROM NIGHT supporters!!!) to April 2018!
  • Last day of operation at our Terry Fox site (Gledhill School) is Friday, December 22nd.
  • Terry Fox re-opens on Monday, January 8th.
For all our upcoming programs, check our our calendar page.
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We’re now an EarlyON Child and Family Centre!
We’d also like to take this opportunity to announce that when we re-open in January, we’ll be an EarlyON Child and Family Centre! We look forward to offering you all the same programs and staff you’re used to, working with our primary funder, the City of Toronto – Children’s Services Division in partnership with the Ministry of Education. In January, we will have new signage and literature displaying the EarlyON Child and Family Centre logo! You’ll see this logo at former Ontario Early Years and Parenting and Literacy sites too. Exciting times for our sector!

Thank you!
Thank you for a GREAT year! This is such a wonderful community and it’s our pleasure to deliver programs to the children, parents, grandparents and other caregivers who consider our programs a second home.
Stay warm. Stay safe. We look forward to being together again in 2018.
Best wishes from the staff and Board of East End Children’s Centre

What is NO CHILD TURNED AWAY?

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East End Children’s Centre was founded by local parents in 1985 and served local families responsively for two decades before the East York child population boom in 2010.

Did you know that between 2006 and 2016 there was a 35% increase in the number of children under four in our immediate community?  And why not?  This is a great neighbourhood for raising kids!

By 2011, we were experiencing  a massive increase in local children, families and caregivers who needed us and we needed to meet their needs while continuing to deliver safe and relevant programming at our Kimbourne and Terry Fox Drop-in Centres.  We tried offering our program in two sessions. 50 children from 9 to 10:30 am and another set of 50 from 10:45 to 12. We served more children but we weren’t giving them a quality experience.

In 2014 we returned to the single session model, locking our doors when occupancy limits were reached. Children were turned away every day. Parents complained. Some of them wrote us letters telling us how demoralizing it was for them and their children to find themselves outside a locked door.  Our board of directors read every word written about the devastation caused.  Many families gave up on us. They weren’t prepared to subject themselves and their children to the stress of trying and not succeeding to get to our programs before the doors were locked.

In 2015, our board of directors decided: enough. We were going to find the funds to expand our programs. We called our program expansion campaign NO CHILD TURNED AWAY. In 2016, a petition was signed by over 700 community members.  Meetings were held with our local city councillor, Janet Davis, and the general manager of Toronto Children’s Services.  We’re so fortunate to have people at the City of Toronto who really care about families and children.  But they were (and still are) undergoing an extremely complex service re-organization and couldn’t entertain our request for a program expansion, as much as they would have liked to. Our board managed to fundraise, through a gala and donations, enough money to fund two additional days a week to our schedule during the chilly months of fall, winter and early spring of 2017-18.

As a result, we increased our child visits by 1035, or 21% last year!  We turned NO CHILDREN AWAY on Mondays and Fridays at both our sites and our program reached capacity less often on the other days of operation.  It’s been so successful that the community came together at our recent Prom Night Gala, to kick off the fundraising for NO CHILD TURNED AWAY days in 2018!

Please keep this program alive with your donations!  We accept cheques, cash and online donations here.