Rural Frontenac Community Services - The 90's Highs, Lows, and Stubborn Survival

Jeff Green | May 21, 2025

In the late 1980s, North Frontenac Community Services (as it was called then) was interested in taking children's services to another level. Years earlier a group of mothers in local communities had begun informal playgroups, which had developed over time. A toy lending library had been established, and connections to health and social services had been established. But there was no fixed location for the services, and no licensed daycare in the area either.

At the time, the Province of Ontario was receptive to community-based projects, so an application was prepared for a $565,000 Child Centre, and it was accepted.

The Child Centre opened in 1990, and the daycare opened in early 1991.

Susan Wilby was hired to run the daycare. She was too young for the job and had to get special permission from the ministry to take on the responsibility. She is still running the daycare today. She remembers what it was like at the start, and what the early years were like.

“We had 5 children when we started, and over the next few months the numbers went up steadily. But as a small rural daycare, it did not work at all the way urban daycare services operated. Most of the children came 2 or 3 days a week, and many families needed the support of daycare subsidies that were available for low income families.

“We had a lot of help from Oso Township, and from the City of Kingston. The managers of Children's Services in Kingston understood the rural reality we were dealing with, and we would never have survived without them,” Wilby said.

With a small family base, the daycare saw attendance go up for a year or two, and then drop when children graduated and started school. At the time, kids went to kindergarten two days one week, and three days the next, and the daycare filled in for some families.

“Scheduling staff was pretty complicated, because we had busy days when we needed more people, and quiet days when we only needed one or two. Luckily, we had some great people in those years,” said Wilby.

The daycare, along with its sister programs upstairs at the Child Centre, played a major role in helping rural families deal with stresses from poverty, social and health issues, over the years. The Child Centre worked with agencies to identify children with hearing issues, learning issues and other challenges very early on, when interventions are the most effective.

Children received subsidies to attend daycare for social reasons, as well as to enable parents to work, in some cases.

The daycare and the Child Centre have remained as a hub for parents ever since the building opened in 1990, and is now where the EarlyOn program for all of Frontenac County is administered.

As the Child Centre was getting on its feet in the mid 1990s, North Frontenac Community Services (NFCS) was about to face the biggest challenge in its history.

The agency was having growing pains, issues with governance and staff relations, all the while attempting to respond to the growing needs of an aging community, when the Province of Ontario changed direction.

NFCS was supported by an operating grant from the provincial government, as a pilot site for a hub agency, to bring services to a rural community.

The grant covered the salaries of an executive director, an assistant, and at least two program managers.

When the Harris government took power in 1996, they made changes across the province. One of those changes was to cut some programs, and the NFCS operating grant, which was key to the operation of the Adult Services part of the agency, disappeared.

There is a letter in the agency archives from the Ministry of Family and Social Services, advising the Board of Directors to conduct an orderly wind down of the agency.

That did not happen.

Instead, the agency shrunk its admin staff down to a single part-time administrator.

Linda Rush had been working at the NFCS office as a provincially funded counsellor at the time, a job unrelated to the NFCS funding, and her job was also cut by the Harris government. As she was winding down her job, she was asked by the NFCS board to work as a very part-time administrator of Adult Services, only one day a week. Over the next couple of years, with help from the Child Centre, which was not facing the same funding crunch, a model of survival was implemented.

By cobbling together administrative funds for each program that was offered, and rent from services housed in the building, such as Ontario Works, a small central admin budget was carved out.

“It became apparent to me, after a couple of years, that we had to sell or close the newspaper. It was losing money and we could not afford it,” Linda recalls now, “and that was a difficult enterprise. I feel like once that was done [in June of 2000] we were more stable financially.

This thin administrative model of service has remained at Rural Frontenac Community Services for 30 years. The agency offers services for seniors, funded by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, a counsellor, funded by the United Way, services for children, funded by the Ministry of Youth and Children's Services, and receives specific funding from Central and North Frontenac for outreach programs. And the list goes on.

This model is certainly limiting, but it is sustainable. If RFCS wants to start a new program to respond to community needs, funding needs to be secured from some source, and each funding relationship brings its own set of reporting criteria that needs to be followed. But with multiple funders, the agency is less vulnerable to changes in direction from a single source. That is one of the lessons from the ‘90’s.