The Thorold Community Activities Group (TCAG) was ready to grab 2022 by the horns, getting back to full capacity and reinstating their full array of programming.
But when the province announced new pandemic restrictions this week, that plan immediately fell through.
“We had just finalized our budget,” says TCAG’s executive director Dan Pelletier.
“We spend three or four months working on our annual plan. We worked hard to anticipate what was happening this year and we had a good budget and then of course it became obsolete when the latest announcement came out.”
The TCAG was hosting a holiday camp for five to ten-year-olds when word came down from the province.
“We had to shut down for the final three days of camp. It was full, it was sold out as soon as we opened registration. There were 32 kids a day. It was difficult because within 24 hours parents had to find other options for care,” says Pelletier.
Throughout the pandemic the TCAG has had to scale back and stop-and-start a lot of their programming, but their licensed childcare, for toddlers and children of pre-school age, has been running consistently since July 2020.
“It has been (difficult) because that’s a highly regulated environment to begin with. With COVID you can’t imagine the literature that comes our way from Public Health authorities,” says Pelletier.
“But here’s the amazing part, we have not lost one day of operation based on a COVID outbreak in any of our programs including our licensed childcare.“
The TCAG is using the shutdown as an opportunity to refresh the facility.
Says Pelletier, “We’re working with contractors to do things that really need to be done but are hard to do when we’re operating, things like repainting and redoing the floors. Getting it all ready for when we open.”
Even though the latest restrictions throw the annual budget in the water, Pelletier is not despairing.
“There would be less revenue as planned on because people won’t be here paying to use our programs. Some of the costs we can cut back on but some costs are fixed, the facility cost and some of our admin overhead, so that’s going to be an adjustment.”
In spite of the latest shutdown and ever-changing restrictions Pelletier says he’s hopeful that 2022 will be a successful year for the TCAG.
“In general we got more used to it each time and the administrative routine was a little more down pat, but this one was disappointing and discouraging. Without this latest setback we had planned to be almost back to our full level of operations pre-COVID. Hopefully we expect things to be close to full capacity for most of the year depending on public health conditions.”
