Announcing the Launch of our Child Care Initiative, in Partnership with Athleta and Allyson Felix!
Child care is an essential support structure at the intersection of career and motherhood.
Without access to affordable, reliable, and safe childcare, women bear the brunt of caregiving responsibilities and, all-to-often, downshift their career or leave the workforce altogether as a result. And the child care crisis is growing.
At &Mother, we aim to elevate the child care conversation through solutions that not only support athlete parents but also create cultural and structural change within the sports industry and beyond.
In partnership with Athleta and Allyson Felix, we are proud to announce a pilot to provide free child care at a key Track and Field championship this week and demonstrate a new standard when it comes to truly supporting the participation and excellence of mothers and caregivers.
The pilot is the first step on the road to standardizing supportive services for parents participating in career-defining athletic events. With this project, we aim to: illuminate the childcare-related barriers for athlete parents; test and iterate on solutions; demonstrate the impact and importance of event-related services that allow for greater parental inclusion; and set new standards to ensure the child care barrier no longer limits an athlete’s participation and excellence.
Sports is a microcosm for what mothers experience across industries when the workplace structure does not reflect the needs of the modern worker. Through this lens, we have an opportunity to examine child care solutions for a “non-traditional” workplace. Athletes and coaches can’t “work from home”, competition and travel schedules do not align with most child care options, but we CAN solve for these challenges. By focusing on a career-defining, elite Track & Field event for our first pilot, we aim to demonstrate that even in this “non-traditional” workplace, we can find a child care solution that both adapts beyond the structure of 9-5 corporate settings and have impacts on how women and caregivers participate and excel when supported.
Adding to the brilliant mix of the Athleta + Allyson Felix partnership, we brought in the incredible team at Vivvi to be our childcare partner for the project. Vivvi is an employer-based child care provider with a range of programs that meet parents “where they are”. This week, their team will be providing stellar programming for a range of ages so that parents can rest assured that their kids are well cared for and happy.
Another important piece of the puzzle – making a critical statement: parenting exists here. Women drop from the workforce when they either feel that career and motherhood are mutually exclusive or they’ve been shown that career and motherhood are mutually exclusive. Having supportive services available, like child care, goes beyond the actual need at individual events – it sends a message and impacts the narrative that women are (and can be) both elite athletes AND mothers.
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