Finding child care in Leelanau County is almost impossible. Finding child care that doesn’t require a full-time enrollment commitment is even harder.

So says Kendall Rose, a Cedar-based parent, wedding planner, and business owner who is working to bring a different type of daycare to Leelanau. Last week, Rose launched a GoFundMe campaign aimed at seeding a new business called The Aspen House. If the concept takes off, it will introduce what Rose describes as “the drop-in model of child care” to the local community.

“I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old, and I’m also a self-employed small business owner,” Rose tells the Leelanau Ticker. “For most of the last four years, my husband and I have been faced with the kinds of challenges that I think a lot of families are familiar with. First, there’s a lack of ability to find child care to begin with. And then when you do, you’re really encouraged to sign up as a full-time family.”

The full-time model of child care, Rose says, “makes a lot of financial sense for the daycare centers themselves.” Most centers have a certain number of child care slots available, and selling those slots on a full-time basis is logistically simple and eliminates the risk that a center could end up operating below capacity – and therefore leaving money on the table – by having stray hours or days where slots aren’t being utilized. The model is also ideal, Rose admits, for families where both parents work full-time and need to have somewhere to take their kids between 8am and 5pm every weekday.

“But if you're working for yourself, or you're a small business owner, or you're part-time employed, you don't necessarily need that full-time care,” Rose reasons. The result, she says, is “a second kind of barrier” to child care access in the community. Simply to secure a slot in a center-based daycare, parents may find that they need to spring for full-time enrollment. “And that’s incredibly expensive, and can be hard to justify if you only need part-time care for your children,” Rose continues.

In the past, Rose says parents who only needed a few hours of child care here or there would turn to non-center-based options – from in-home care providers to nannies or babysitters. With northern Michigan’s child care shortage being what it is, though, even those options are hard to find and more expensive than they used to be.

Eventually, Rose had a lightbulb moment.

 “I am friends with a lot of other moms that are small business owners and they're self-employed, and we started realizing that a lot of us were driving to Traverse City and the YMCA, because the Y offers two hours of complimentary childc are with your membership, for parents to utilize while they’re using YMCA facilities,” Rose says. “We realized we were driving up to 30 minutes each way, just to be able to access those two hours of child care. I wasn’t the only person who was schlepping my kids all the way there, dropping them off, and then sitting on the computer in the lounge trying to get some work done.”

Seeing a slew of other parents “in the same financial situation, employment situation, and life stages with our kids” got Rose thinking: What if there was a child care center in Leelanau County that focused not on full-time enrollment and tuition, but on flexible drop-in hours and parental productivity? That brainstorming led to The Aspen House, a planned daycare facility that would include built-in coworking space for parents. That way, mom or dad could drop off their kids for a few hours, set up a work station in the coworking area, knock out their work checklist, and then collect their children and head home.

Right now, the concept is in its infant stages. Rose’s hope is to build upon a growing trend of “micro-center” daycare businesses in Leelanau. Those types of businesses, which essentially operate as a hybrid between center-based and home-based care, allow for the care of up to 12 children at a time, depending on caregiver numbers, child ages, and caregiver-to-child ratios. (Ratio rules are stricter for younger children than they are for toddlers.) The twist with The Aspen House would be the drop-in model, which Rose is still finessing.

“Essentially, it would be open to 12 children a day, but with flexible timing,” Rose says. “It would be a membership-based program, and we’d probably start with around 24 families who don’t need full-time care and don’t need the same exact schedule. Then we’d go from there.”

Rose acknowledges that a true drop-in model – where any member could drop off their child at any time, depending on the shifting needs of their schedule – isn’t possible in child care due to staffing and ratio rules. Still, she’s hoping to figure out something that gives parents more leeway than what they can find elsewhere.

“There is going to have to be some scheduling ahead of time, in order to make sure that the correct ratio of staffing to children is available,” Rose says. “But I think we can do something that’s a little more like booking a hair appointment. If you try to book a same-day hair appointment, you probably won’t find a lot of availability, or maybe it’d be cancellations only. But if you book a week or two ahead of time, you can probably have your pick of hours. That’s how I envision this working.”

To get the ball rolling, Rose needs to secure space for The Aspen House. The newly-launched GoFundMe campaign is raising $50,000 to pay for a lease or down payment, along with other startup costs. She’s currently eyeing a commercial space in Empire, though she says she could end up somewhere else in Leelanau, depending on what’s available when she’s ready to get started. Her goal is to get the business up and running sometime in 2025, with a focus “on serving families with children ages 0-30 months.”

Pictured: Rose and her family