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Starting a Childcare Facility in Vancouver

The City of Vancouver staff work with developers, architects, landscape architects, community members and early childhood educators to develop and/or renovate childcare facilities. A number of facilities are currently at various stages of the development process.

1. Steps for Establishing a Childcare Centre
To assist professionals, the City has published a brochure on the process for establishing a childcare centre in Vancouver:

• City of Vancouver’s Steps for Establishing a Childcare Centre in Vancouver in an Existing Building (PDF, 118KB)

If you are applying for development permit (DE) that requires a change of use: please refer to this Childcare Development Permit Checklist (PDF, 87KB) to ensure that your application includes all required components.

How to Start a Child Care Facility in BC (PDF, 111KB) is another relevant publication, published and distributed by the Westcoast Childcare Resource Centre. Westcoast CRC is an external organization that provides resources, referrals and information about child care and early learning for children.

2. City of Vancouver Design & Technical Guidelines
The City works closely with Community Care Facilities Licensing at Vancouver Coastal Health in the development of childcare facilities. The City’s design work is guided by both the Childcare Design Guidelines (PDF, 331KB) and the Childcare Technical Guidelines - revised November 2008 (PDF, 1.04MB).

3. Additional Design Considerations
Issues and discussion of outdoor play space design considerations for child care facilities can be found in Research, Practices and Trends in Child Care Centre Design for Outdoor Play (PDF, 957KB), a report by Dr. Susan Herrington, commissioned by the Social Planning Department. If you are planning to develop a childcare facility you may also want to look at our Tools and Resources web-page, as there are a number of other documents relating to design considerations that will be helpful.

4. Quality by Design :: a national project
Finally, consider looking at the information on the Quality by Design webpage. The City of Vancouver is a partner in the Quality by Design project—a national exploratory project intended to develop strategies for improving quality at the policy level, by working with provincial policy makers on system-wide policy level approaches.

The Quality by Design project will identify and consolidate information derived from research and work with provincial policy makers in a collaborative process to transform the information into tools and strategiesdesigned to improve the quality of early childhood learning and care.

Photo: Signage for a new child care facility being developed at #1 Kingsway in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

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Questions or Comments? E-mail: social.planning@vancouver.ca

© 2010 City of Vancouver
Last modified: Tuesday, May 11, 2010