For fifteen years, Bella Vita and Elowyn have held one belief: children only get one childhood. Amanda Worms reflects on quality care, educator respect, and the funding choices that protect it.
For fifteen years, Bella Vita Early Learning and Elowyn have been built on one belief: children only get one childhood, and every decision we make should protect it.
This work is personal to me. As a young family, I never had access to quality, licensed child care for any of my three children. I built this program so that every family could have what I couldn't and that belief still shapes every decision we make today, including the hard ones.
Along the way, I also fell in love with the educators in this field. Even now, when we look at our parent surveys, our team is always the thing families love the most, and honestly, that's exactly what we like to hear. It was clear to me even then, in my own young parent program, that they were far more than child minders. They were nurses, educators, a parent support system, big sisters, therapists, development specialists, comedians, musicians, scientists often all in the same afternoon. If I'm honest, I didn't fully understand everything they did until I saw it up close, and once I understood how they were compensated for it, I wrote my first letter to Premier Gordon Campbell in 2002, in support of the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC and Early Childhood Educators of BC's push for an affordable, publicly funded child care system. They were the glue holding everything together, and they still are. To this day, our educators are the true heartbeat of our organization.
A Shared Goal, Worth Talking About Openly
We're often asked why we haven't moved to the $10-a-Day ChildCareBC program. It's a fair question, and one we think deserves an honest, thoughtful answer rather than a simple yes or no.
Here's what we believe, plainly: everyone in this conversation educators, operators, advocates, and policy makers alike wants the same thing. We all want children to have access to care that's affordable and excellent. Nobody sits down at the table wanting less for children. Where we sometimes differ is on how funding models translate into what actually happens day to day in a classroom, and that's a conversation worth having together, not around each other.
We come to this conversation from experience, not just from the outside looking in. I've served on the boards of several $10-a-day centres in the Lower Mainland, including a Richmond location where the board ultimately faced a difficult decision: funding constraints under the model meant the program could no longer sustain its fully certified team, since the $10-a-day funding model pushes staffing costs down to bare-minimum ratios with minimum qualifications. For families unfamiliar with our ratios, that would mean only three educators for every twelve children in an Infant and Toddler program (one ITE, one ECE, and one ECEA), and three educators for every twenty-five children in a 3-5 program (one ECE and two ECEAs) with educators paid only what the wage grid allowed, regardless of their actual qualifications or experience. Rather than reduce the number of educators, cut their wages, or lower the quality of care those children received, the board, alongside the parents, chose to leave the $10-a-day program. It wasn't an abstract decision. Some of those children had been enrolled with this team since infancy, and staying in the model would have meant hiring less experienced educators at lower wages, leaving those children without the consistency, bonds, and relationships they'd built over years. I share that experience not to criticize anyone, but because it's exactly the kind of frontline reality that's useful for government, advocates, and operators to keep learning from together.
What the Research Tells Us
The BC Early Learning Framework (BCELF) is the province's own articulation of what high-quality early learning looks like for children from birth through Grade 3. It describes learning as something that happens through the relationship between children and educators together, attentive to one another, following curiosity rather than a script. Our Reggio-inspired, nature-rooted approach is our way of living out that same vision.
The province's own research backs up why that attentiveness matters so much. In 2020, an independent evaluation of the early $10-a-day "Prototype Sites" centres chosen specifically because they already scored as high-quality found that quality still made a measurable difference for children, even within that already strong group. Children at relatively lower-quality sites were less likely to be positively impacted by their care, and families and educators at those sites reported lower satisfaction and wellbeing. That's a useful data point for everyone in this sector: quality isn't a nice-to-have layered on top of affordability, it's the mechanism through which affordable care actually benefits a child.
That's also why staffing levels, educator wages, mentorship, and professional development matter so much to us, and why we've watched closely as the current Operating Funding Model (OFM) has been piloted and refined. Groups like Early Childhood Educators of BC and community operators like Kiwassa Neighbourhood House have shared thoughtful, public feedback about how the model affects staffing and program stability. We see that as exactly the kind of frontline input that helps build something better. The Province's own Budget 2026 decision to pause to re-evaluate and stabilize the model, after hearing similar concerns directly from operators, tells us the system is capable of that kind of listening.
Why Our Philosophy Matters
Everything we've described so far the research, the funding conversations, the partnerships exists in service of a philosophy we believe in deeply: a Reggio-inspired, nature-rooted approach to early learning.
At its heart, this philosophy sees children as capable, curious, and full of ideas worth taking seriously, not as empty vessels waiting to be filled by all knowing adults. Educators don't stand in front of children delivering lessons; they observe, listen, and follow where a child's thinking wants to go, then build meaningful learning experiences around it. The environment itself, indoors and out, is treated as a kind of teacher too: a thoughtfully arranged space, or a walk through the forest, can spark a question or an idea just as powerfully as an adult can.
We root our philosophy in nature because childhood spent outdoors, in real weather, real dirt, and real seasons, builds something a classroom alone can't: resilience, patience, wonder, and a felt connection to the world beyond ourselves. It also happens to be where children slow down enough to notice things, and noticing is where real learning starts.
We hold onto this philosophy because we've watched it work, not in the abstract, but in the everyday moments where a child surprises us with a question or new discovery we didn't expect, or an idea we couldn't have taught. That's also why we take funding, staffing, and training as seriously as we do: this philosophy only comes alive when educators have the time, support, and stability to actually practice it, rather than rush through a checklist. Philosophy without the conditions to live it out is just words on a page.
A quote we return to often is niente senza gioia, Loris Malaguzzi's own words: nothing without joy. We take that seriously, and we've come to understand it as more than a nice sentiment. A child can't actually feel joy unless their nervous system is regulated enough to experience it. So before we can talk about curiosity, creativity, or learning, we have to first care for the whole child: their sense of safety, their confidence, their nervous system, as an individual. Joy isn't a bonus we add once the important work is done. It's a sign that the important work is already happening.
A Passion That Grows Through Reciprocity
This work has never felt like a business strategy to us, even on the days it requires business decisions. It's a passion, and like anything worth tending, it only grows when it's surrounded by other people who care about the same balance we do.
That's why we've kept building out our professional development and training, and why we spend time consulting with other local providers and with operators across the province and country, about this work and what it actually does for children, families, and educators. When another program does right by the children in their care, everyone benefits, including ours. We don't see that as competition. We see it as the whole point.
None of it happens alone. Thank you to every family and supporter who has joined us at an Early Learning Unboxed event or one of our community gatherings the past 3 years those rooms are where this thinking gets tested, challenged, and made better through real conversation. We show up for each other, and that reciprocity is what lets this work keep growing. It's bigger than any one centre. It's about making sure all children, not just the ones enrolled with us, have access to the kind of care that lets them thrive.
The People Who Make This Possible
I was a founding member of Childcare Professionals of BC, a group of providers who came together in 2018 because we saw serious implications with the ChildcareBC plan and wanted to see children and quality stay front and centre, and to focus growth in the areas that needed it most, especially Infant and Toddler care and access to stronger training for ECEs. Together, we built a rigorous quality assessment standard (BCQAS) that reflects research and the highest quality standards found around the world and what we believe care should actually look like, not just what a checklist can measure. That last piece, training, is one of the most important parts of quality that's easy to overlook.
We've also been fortunate to participate in and support the Work Integrated Learning Program at Okanagan College, and work in collaboration with the BC Professional Development bursary to bring exceptional speakers and researchers to Kelowna to train our team and the wider early years community here. We've been honoured to learn from Kisa Marx, Dr. Jody Carrington, and Dr. Kathryn Murray, and we're infinitely grateful for our ongoing relationship with Bridgitte Alomes of Natural Pod who keeps us inspired and cheers us on. These are people doing genuinely important work for children, and we feel lucky to be part of that same circle.
We were especially proud when Kisa, an educator and author, featured our own children's work in her latest book, We Are Who We Are Waiting For, drawing on a charcoal inquiry our children explored together. That inquiry began with the 2023 wildfires, and it's a project our children are still interacting with today. Kisa's experience looking through our exhibit on that work is part of what led her there. We were also featured on her podcast, Liberated Learning, discussing the changes needed in the education sector, and she shared that she was inspired by being part of our first Early Learning Unboxed conference. Moments like that remind us how much our children continue to teach us. We work hard to cultivate quality experiences for them, and they constantly surprise us right back, finding new ways of thinking and doing things that we couldn't have planned for ourselves.
Where We've Landed, For Now
Given all of this, we've chosen to invest in staffing above the bare-minimum ratios the $10-a-day model allows, and in wages that reflect what our educators are actually qualified to do, even when that means staying outside the model. We've also worked to support the families who've stayed with us, remained loyal to our programs, and trusted us with their children year after year through ACCB application support and our referral program, among other ways we try to show up for the families who show up for us. If cost is a genuine barrier for your family, we'd rather have that conversation directly than have you make a decision without knowing your options.
We don't expect every family, educator, or organization to land in the same place we have, and that's alright. What matters most isn't whether we all agree on the direction or the plan for child care in this province. It's whether we keep asking the questions, keep seeking the answers, and leave room to communicate with one another along the way. We believe everyone deserves to be part of an honest, shared conversation about what's working and what still needs work, because when the sector pulls in the same direction, children are the ones who benefit.
Children only get one childhood. We're grateful to be one part of a much larger community working to make sure it's a good one.
With warmth and gratitude,
— Amanda Worms
CEO | Bella Vita Early Learning, Executive Director | Elowyn
Further reading: BC Ministry of Education and Child Care — BC Early Learning Framework and Operating Funding Model overview; BC Budget 2026 Highlights; Kiwassa Neighbourhood House, "Help ensure that all families in BC can access quality childcare"; Early Childhood Educators of BC (ECEBC) commentary on the Operating Funding Model; Childcare BC Universal Prototype Sites: Final Report (R.A. Malatest & Associates, 2020).