Campus Community Cooperative Day Care Centre

The Campus Community Cooperative Day Care Centre (CCCDCC) is an organization that provides day care for the children of students, faculty and staff at the University of Toronto St. George campus and for the surrounding community.

The CCCDCC opened its doors on September 22, 1969. The first day care centre to operate at the University of Toronto, it paved the way for the eventual establishment of accessible and affordable child care on campus, providing students and working parents with the necessary supports to pursue their education and career. Their focus on infant care was pioneering. The centre was one of the first in a growing movement towards parent- and community-run child care, formed by a grassroots co-operative group of parents, students and volunteers at a time when the concept of child care for all was in its infancy and still carried the connotation of being only for at-risk children and families.

In the Spring of 1969 a group of feminists from The Women’s Liberation Movement – Toronto distributed a leaflet on campus to gauge interest and enlist participants in a cooperative day care facility. Their goal was to achieve “accessible, high-quality, affordable early learning and child care” for the University of Toronto community[1]. At this time the university assumed no responsibility for child care. The leafleting and a simultaneous letter writing campaign resulted in 40 registrations and thus the CCCDCC was born. With term time approaching the group focussed on material needs, primarily the search for a location in which to house a day care facility. Requests to the university for space were unsuccessful. Eventually the group took matters into their own hands and occupied 12 Sussex Avenue, an unused building belonging to the University of Toronto from which the day care began operations.

The early years of the CCCDCC’s existence involved ongoing activism and advocacy to get the support they needed from the University of Toronto to operate and subsequently expand. Their activities garnered considerable attention from the media including special editions of The Varsity devoted to their cause [2]. There was also front-page coverage in newspapers like The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. The CCCDCC’s commitment to parent involvement, early childhood education, the cooperative movement, feminism, collective decision making, alternative approaches to family structures and childrearing were seen as ‘counter-culture’ and set them at odds with both the university administration of the time and the provincial government’s day care branch. As observed by Lisa Pasolli, the co-op was “…part of a much bigger story of the feminist and New Left movements of the late 1960s, one devoted to challenging the constraints of the nuclear family and undoing sexist child-rearing.”[3]

The founding members of the CCCDCC came from the university’s student and staff population and included, amongst others: Sarah Spinks, Kathryn Petersen, Dr. Lorenne Smith and John Foster (the donor of the records in accession B2021-0002). Other key individuals, such as Julie Mathien, went on to play important roles in education and child care advocacy through work with groups like The Daycare Organizing Committee and the Toronto Board of Education. The membership changed regularly in this period and consisted of various parents, supporters and volunteers in addition to two paid co-ordinators hired to help run the centre. The importance of volunteer time and energy in establishing, organizing, and running the CCCDCC cannot be overstated. Volunteer roles ranged from daily duties supplementing the staff (cooking, diapers, playing, etc.) to committee work, advocacy and a variety of other responsibilities.

The CCCDCC’s activism is demonstrated by two key events. The first was a rally on March 25, 1970 to demand guaranteed, rent-free space and a commitment to building renovations that would enable them to meet and pass the licensing requirements of Ontario’s Day Nurseries Act. The rally met at Sidney Smith and was followed by a march to Simcoe Hall. The subsequent sit-in (the University of Toronto’s first) lasted 22 hours, ending the following morning when University of Toronto President Claude Bissell made an announcement guaranteeing funds for renovation (though the university still did not assume any responsibility for university-provided childcare). The second major event took place in April 1972 when members of the CCCDCC occupied an empty club house on Devonshire Place to create a day care for over 2s (the ‘graduates’ of the Sussex daycare). They maintained 24/7 occupation of the space for a full year.

After the mid-70s the CCCDCC stepped back from the front lines of advocacy and activism but has continued to provide child care for the University of Toronto community from various locations on campus. They celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2019. For more information see The Campus Community Coop Daycare website.

Notes
[1] Mathien, J. (2021). Struggles and sit-ins: The early years of Campus Community Co-operative Day Care Centre and child care in Canada. Childcare Resource and Research Unit. Page 54. Accessed at childcarecanada.org
[2] The Varsity, Volume 90 – No. 62, March 25, 1970 ; The Varsity, Volume 90 – No. 61, March 26, 1970
[3] Pasolli, L. (2021). “Creating universal child care from the ground up: The legacy of Toronto's grassroots child care advocacy,” Childcare Resource and Research Unit blog

[1] Mathien, J. (2021). Struggles and sit-ins: The early years of Campus Community Co-operative Day Care Centre and child care in Canada. Childcare Resource and Research Unit. Page 54. Accessed at childcarecanada.org
[2] The Varsity, Volume 90 – No. 62, March 25, 1970 ; The Varsity, Volume 90 – No. 61, March 26, 1970
[3] Pasolli, L. (2021). “Creating universal child care from the ground up: The legacy of Toronto's grassroots child care advocacy,” Childcare Resource and Research Unit blog

University of Toronto Archives. Oral History Collection on Student Activism. Oral history interview with John Foster conducted by Ruth Belay, 27 February 2020. A2020-0010/014S and University of Toronto Archives. Oral History Collection on Student Activism. Oral history interview with Julie Mathien conducted by Ruth Belay, 17 December 2019. A2020-0010/003S.