EXCERPT FROM: Petoskey News-Review
By Brandon Hubbard
HARBOR SPRINGS — A Harbor Springs day care is calling out for funding to help keep their doors open.
North Country Kids Daycare and Preschool Academy has been calling on past and future donors to help them keep its current facilities running.
The day care held fundraising events Wednesday and Thursday evenings, but as of the mid-afternoon, was more than $6,000 short of keeping its doors open at in the Fairview Square Center in Harbor Springs, despite collecting nearly $4,000 in donations this week.
"The problem is that we are not subsidized by anybody," said North Country Kids executive director Liz Beasley. "We're not attached to a church, we are a not-for-profit organization that is not supported or underwritten by anybody, so we get day care fees for the staff and utilities, but when it comes to anything above that it comes down to fundraising."
Beasley said fundraising this year has been "very, very challenging" for the day care.
North Country Kids is the successor to the Holy Childhood Church Daycare and Preschool. About 60 full-time children attend the day care.
Since the Holy Childhood Church in downtown Harbor Springs demolished the old Native American boarding school on its grounds to make way for a new church center in 2007, the day care/preschool has made a new home at Fairview Square Shopping Center. At first, there was concern that the day care would close after it moved out of the old church building, but the community rallied around its beloved day care and quickly moved to a new location.
The day care center was renamed North Country Kids in 2009, but many people still don’t realize that North Country Kids is no longer subsidized by the church. In fact, most local day cares are either run out of people’s homes or subsidized by churches, hospitals or other large organizations.