Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
To celebrate the recent start of the construction of the lobby renovation at Parkview Warsaw YMCA and a new Play Café - that will include The River’s fourth coffee shop in the county - the Kosciusko Community YMCA had a “groundbreaking” ceremony Tuesday with the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce.
The Play Café is the first one in the community, according to YMCA CEO Dr. Jim Swanson in his welcoming remarks at the ceremony.
“The YMCA puts Christian principles into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body,” he said. “... This is an exciting time for us. We’re changing the face of a 10-year-old building. So it’s always a little bit scary to kind of deconstruct and then reconstruct inside our building. So it’s kind of a new direction and we’re super excited about the opportunity to serve working families in the community through Play Café.”
He said they already announced their teacher training center, which will work great with the Play Café.
“We also want to announce that inside this facility will be a full-serve coffee bar, and we are finalizing the details with Amanda (Meerzo) to have The River be our brand company inside of our Y. So we’re excited about that,” Swanson stated.
He said The River’s reputation preceeds themselves in the community and they do an outstanding job.
“They seem to be opening up coffee shops everywhere, but that’s awesome. We’re thrilled. And we’re thrilled for our members. We’re thrilled for the hospital. We hope that they’re coming over and things like that. It’s just exciting,” Swanson stated.
On bringing a River coffee shop to the YMCA, Meerzo later said, “It was part of the whole plan of the play area is to have a café in there, and the opportunity came for The River to be that partnership, and we thought it would be an amazing collaboration to work with them.”
For the coffee shop in the Y, she said they will scale back on their offerings. They won’t have food but will have small protein bites and different smoothies to cater to the needs of the YMCA.
“So we will be changing some of that menu devoted to here,” Meerzo stated.
Swanson gave a special thanks to the YMCA Board of Directors, past board, LaunchPad, the Kosciusko County Community Foundation and the Lilly Endowment.
Sherry Searles, LaunchPad director, said, “We are so excited for this partnership with the YMCA. As you know, our community struggles with having enough high-quality, affordable childcare for our working parents, much like communities across the state, across the country, so this Play Café just gives us one more opportunity to serve working parents.”
She said there are still a lot of parents working remotely who are trying to parent and work simultaneously.
“Here’s an opportunity to bring your children - ages 0 to 5, with a special emphasis on 0 to 3 - to a lovely curated space, grab a cup of coffee and take that Zoom call and work with that colleague and meet with your boss and have your children cared for by play coaches who will be specialists in early childhood so your children will have a wonderful experience and at the same time you can get your work done,” Searles said.
She thanked the YMCA for hosting the Play Café, as well as the Lilly and Community foundations and the Indiana Employer Grant that’s helping to fund it.
Ashlee Parker, director of early childhood programs at the YMCA and director of the Lilly Pad Play Café, said that after a lot of planning and working together, “We’re real excited to see this project underway and started.”
The Lilly Pad Play Café will offer an exceptional play experience to children 0 to 3 years old and offer open-ended play and social opportunities for kids to grow, Parker continued.
“It will have an semi-structured schedule to it. It will have preschool-like elements, but it won’t be preschool and it won’t have a preschool format,” she said. “We’ll have a scheduled story time under our large, indoor reading tree that we’re real excited about and we’ll have our unique house and market area - I’m particularly excited about that one dramatic play area for the kids.”
She said there’ll be different opportunities for gross motor development and a low-to-the-ground toddler climbing gym. The area will have a lot of open-ended and creative materials for kids to play in.
“As Sherry said, we’ll have trained play coaches that will be running it and we’ll make sure that it’s a safe, enjoyable time for your children,” Parker said. “We also are going to have a designated infant crawler area to make sure they have a safe place to explore, and we’re just really excited to see this project underway and to be able to serve these youngest members of our community and their families.”
Michael Pahl, YMCA Board of Directors member, said, “I just wanted to quickly share that it’s been a huge emphasis of the Y to continue to partner with (local organizations) that provide a lot of benefits to the young families. Anything that we can do in this community to continue to provide value to young families, we’re going to continue to look at it.”
He recognized several partners on the project, including the city of Warsaw, Chamber, LaunchPad, Robinson Construction, among others, who are helping to get the project completed by October.
In an interview after the ceremony, Parker explained that a Play Café is “a space for children ages 0 to 3 and it will be staffed. Working parents can come and they can register online for a one- to four-hour time block to drop their child off. Parents stay on site then and they can get a cup of coffee and they can work in the workspaces that we’ll have available. And then their children will be with trained play coaches and we’ll have some open-ended activities and some time for them to explore, and different stations and things for them to make the choice to where they would like to go.”
A parent does not have to be a Y member to bring their children, but Y members will get a discounted price, she said. Some of the details - like the price and the hours - are still being finalized. The ratio of trained coaches to children will be around 1:4 to 1:5. The Play Café will be able to handle 16 children at one time.
For the working parent, there will be wifi, the coffee shop and different types of work spaces.
Searles said, “Our biggest deficit for childcare is in that 0 to 3, the infant toddlers. That’s the hardest care to find in our community, and so that’s why this program is focusing on that age group. So it will provide one more opportunity for working parents to have a place to bring their children. So it’ll be for those working remotely or perhaps you’re an entrepreneur and you just need a couple hours to just get down to business and you’re parenting at the same time. This will be a place where those types of working folks can find childcare.”
She said they did look into employers who were working remotely, or at least were doing Covid, to find out from them if they still had employees working remotely.
“We were surprised to hear that many of them do still have their workforce working from home,” Searles said. “We did look into that to make sure that there was a need that this Play Café would meet.”
When it comes to childcare needs in this community, Searles said, “Right now, what we’re noticing more than anything is the affordability part of childcare. We now have a waiting list for folks who need a childcare voucher to help them pay for childcare. So due to cuts in the state budget, we don’t have enough vouchers now, so that really affects parents who can’t afford the cost of childcare. So we definitely see affordability as the top issue right now.”
For more information about the project or upcoming membership updates, visit www.kcymca.org or contact the YMCA Welcome Center at 574-269-9622.
