Awash Utamet daycare puts culture and community first

The centre de la petite enfance (CPE) Awash Utamet in Chibougamau held its inauguration ceremony January 16, just under a year after receiving its daycare license from the Quebec Ministry of Families. Awash Utamet, meaning first steps, is a joint childcare facility that brings Native and non-Native children together, a dream that took seven years of planning and hard work to realize.

“Twenty years ago I don’t think the community would have been ready to have non-Native families attending a Native organization,” Jo-Ann Toulouse, director general of the Chibougamau Eenou Friendship Centre and Awash Utamet’s secretary treasurer, told the Nation.

“We’ve been open for almost a year now. We received our license February 8, 2016. We’re at 611 5e rue, and completely autonomous from the friendship centre.”

Involved in the daycare project from the get-go, Toulouse related the long and arduous process required to secure funding and approval from Quebec to open a childcare centre, and also how rewarding it has been to see things come to fruition.

“We’ve been working on this since 2009,” she said. “Everything that could possibly happen to an organization trying to get on its feet has happened to us. We changed program directors with the Ministry [of Families] at least six times. One of our early project coordinators, Charles Burgy, had a serious health issue and had to withdraw from the project. We had a [building] site that was pulled out from under us and given to someone else right as we were ready to move forward – just that put us back six months. Then there was the Tomassi scandal a couple years ago, that put us back easily two years.”

Tony Tomassi, former Minister of Families under Premier Jean Charest, was charged with fraud and breach of trust and was accused of, among other things, cronyism in the awarding of contracts for public daycare permits. For Awash Utamet, this prolonged their application process, forcing them to start from scratch with a new minister and new contacts in the ministry.

“As frustrating as it has been, there are so many fabulous people working at the ministry that really know the business side of things inside and out and really care about children,” said Toulouse. “[In the end] they saw what we were aspiring to and helped us to achieve it.”

According to Toulouse, all of this adversity was nothing compared to the incredible technical challenges faced by her and her team.

“Trying to retain our cultural identity while still meeting the criteria of the ministry, sometimes it felt like we were dumbing down what we were trying to do,” she said. “Cultural literacy is very important to the friendship centre and to our community and we don’t want to cut people off from cultural expression.

“You can’t go faster than the ministry and you can’t go faster than your board of directors,” she added. “We had to discuss and reach a consensus. This is a public, non-profit organization wholly funded by the government and the $7 a day that the parents pay.

“The reason why there’s an Aboriginal childcare centre in Chibougamau is because people in the community have been asking for reliable childcare for years. There are 800 Aboriginal people in Chibougamau so the need is there.”

By bringing Native and non-Native childcare under one roof, Awash Utamet was able to secure funding and approval for a 60-place daycare that generates enough revenue for the centre to break even. A 30-place daycare dedicated solely to the Native community would not have been able to support a full-time staff.

Toulouse credited everyone on Awash Utamet’s board of directors for their perseverance in making the childcare centre a reality: President Melissa Rogers, Vice President Julie Tremblay, Administrators Anouk Raphael and Julie Hébert, and Julie Potvin, who came on board as a staff rep once the centre opened. She also mentioned the support of Lucie Bergeron in the early goings and the passion of Awash Utamet’s director Line Marcil.

“Once we started hiring, people expressed so much interest,” Toulouse exclaimed. “The whole community is saying, ‘Can I be your friend?’ Non-native families have been saying they want their children growing up learning Cree, knowing their neighbours as their friends and not as an ‘other’.

“We know there’s a certain amount of racism in any town, but opportunities like this give us a chance to show just the opposite. It’s gratifying and it’s humbling to see that in the end the work of the friendship centre and people in the town and the communities is bearing fruit.”

One of the key elements of Awash Utamet is making it known that everyone in the community is welcome in the room. In that respect it’s a little bit different from what you see in other daycares – families can come in and out as they want, and sometimes the kookoms and mooshoms will come in and share with the students.

The centre can be reached at 418 748-6161 and also has a Facebook page – CPE Awash Utamet.