Q+A | Julie Green on YWCA NWT's new downtown daycare proposal

A Yellowknife women's organization has applied to the City of Yellowknife to build a new daycare, after abandoning a previous proposal after it was initially rejected by the city.

YWCA NWT wants  to open a new space for 56 children in the three empty lots next to Boston Pizza on 48th Street downtown. 

Julie Green is the president of the NWT YWCA. She spoke to Trailbreaker host Hilary Bird about the plans for the daycare. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Can you tell us more about your latest daycare proposal?

We put in an expression of interest document to [the Department of Education, Culture and Employment] around Christmas, and they were giving away five portables that were used at William McDonald School as classrooms for children.

During the rebuild, the school, they acquired these portables... and then the school opened and then they didn't need the portables anymore. So we put in an expression of interest and we were granted them provisionally. Then we needed to find somewhere to put the portables, which are four classroom modulars and one bathroom modular. So we made an offer that was accepted on those three lots on 48th Street.

What is your plan going forward now? What special permission would you need from the city to move this project forward?

We need a variance and a development — a variance of the bylaw and a development permit. So what we're working on right now is the variance. The city bylaw for that area of Yellowknife has a minimum height requirement for buildings of two stories, and the modulars are one storey and they're not stackable. 

So we have applied for a variance and our architect has designed a facade for the modulars that make them look very attractive. They don't look just like boxes and it also raises the height of the streetscape to just about two storeys.

In the fall, CBC spoke with the YWCA and the city about a different YWCA proposal to build a daycare. It would have been located in Niven Lake neighbourhood. The city surprised the YWCA by rejecting that application, citing traffic concerns. What made you decide to just walk away from that project and not perhaps put pressure on the city to try and resolve it?

We met with the city to try and resolve that issue, and ultimately, they provided us with a letter that said this wasn't going to happen. There was no point doing a traffic study. The traffic situation with the way that corner of Haener and Moyle Drive is designed makes it unsuitable for the kind of pick up and drop off that would be required at a daycare. 

Why is this project so important to the NWT YWCA?

Our mission is to uplift women and help them realize their full potential. And so a woman who can't find daycare in order to pursue whatever else she wants to do in her life — education, work, painting, whatever it is, is really limited in doing that if she's unable to find daycare. So we're very interested in making daycare available for families, women in particular, to thrive. 

Everybody gets what they need out of the situation. The children get licensed professional daycare. The parents have time to go and do what they need to do without worrying about how their children are being cared for.

Do you have a sense of when, if everything goes as planned, as when you could open this facility?

I wish I had an exact date for you. The agreement we have with ECE about acquiring those modulars is that we would have a daycare open by the end of March. And so that's our goal, that's what we're working towards. So at some point in the future, we'll be able to tell the public how they can apply for the daycare and the cost and and all of those other details.

The YWCA NWT is hosting an open house tonight at 6 p.m. at Gotı̨li Kǫ̀ [5011 54th Street], where architectural drawings of the new daycare will be available to the public to view.