We do a coop of sorts. A church allows us to use their children's area. The church allows to use like a girl scout group thus they are not in control so that they do not need a license. We try to keep it to a limit of ten children. We do it one day a week. It may soon go to two days a week. We have one worker who is paid and a mother works each week. This allows the moms to just work once every 2 months are less. Because of the constraints infants have on a group we try to limit to 2 years and above but have had children as young as 15 months. We run it from 9 to 2. We pay 5 dollars a week. This is a mandatory payment whether your child comes or not. It is the minimium amount required to pay our worker and we also give the church 5 dollars a month per family in the group. so if you have 8 familiesw inthe group you would give the church 40 dollars. The church did not ask for this we just do it. We pay as a contract labor our worker is responsible to pay any ss or income tax. we do not do w2's. We do not hold the church liable for any accidents either. We have never had any kind of accidens except for bumps. We have been doing this for about 5 years on and off as long as we can find the children. We have gone as high as 8 dollars when we had fewer children it is still cheaper than day care. Because most of us stay at home with our children and money is tight we do empahsis the need for sick children to remain at home. so as not to cause even more to have to miss. Try and get a hold of a day care centers book that they give out to their parents. We do use the rule if your child has had fever within 24 hours do not bring them. We really love it.
We have a babysitting coop in our neighborhood that has been running for at least 10+ years. It works on a point system; if you babysit for someone, you earn points. If you have someone babysits for you, you lose points. The idea is to stay close to 0. We currently have over 30 members in our coop; generally, if someone is negative in the point balance, you are to ask them to babysit first, so that they can come back closer to zero.
Anyway, it gets more complicated, but that's the gist of it. It's been a wonderful resource, and a great way to get to know neighbors and friends!
We don't have a co-op through the school but we have one through church. Each woman gets 4-5 kids alternating between Tuesdays and Thursdays and they run it like a daycare. Nobody pays but each takes their turn. If you don't take your turn, you're basically kicked out of it. It works very well and saves a lot of families money they don't have.
We are kicking this around also. There is a group of 8 of us that really would like to go to local town/school committee, finance committee etc. meetings. But it's tough to get out for all of these--we are considering rotating schedule and babysitting and updating the others on what is happening. Let me know if you are successful with yours.
Does anyone have any experience to share with setting up and running a babysitting cooperative, where parents take turns taking other parents children for a night, so that they can all get free babysitting. We are considering this as a mechanism for giving our parents some much-needed respite and also for giving them the opportunity for getting to PTO meetings and other school events. Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.
