DevelopmentalMilestonesChildcare.com

History

Developmental Milestones Childcare LLC has been a long time coming. Many ask the founder, Ashley, why start a daycare? Ashley answers, why not? Feeling called to do something about the childcare crisis, she is doing just that.

Owner/Founder, Ashley Kosharek has a passion for family and business, in that order. Ashley is a local business owner of a cleaning service and resides in Eau Claire, where she also grew up. Her family works and plays in the Chippewa Valley. Her fiance is also a business owner, who grew up in the area. Together they have a blended family of five boys.

Ashley's cleaning business, AMK Cleaning Services LLC leased its first commercial space in 2015. Faced with the adversity of her staff not being able to work due to childcare issues she contemplated renting the space next door and starting a daycare for her employees. She started running the numbers and reading up on what was required and soon realized it was going to take a lot more time and money than she had for a daycare start-up. After all, she was still at the beginning of building her cleaning business. So she let those aspirations go (for the time being).

Fast forward to 2020 when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, Ashley was pregnant and found herself struggling now to find childcare herself. Joining many waitlists that would never call. With the blessing of another baby in April of 2022, she again started calling and getting on more waitlists with hopes that the shortages would have changed. However, they definitely had not. Luckily for Ashley, she was able to find a trusted friend doing in-home care.

As 2022 went on and a handful of her employees were starting to enter into motherhood years and getting pregnant she was seeing the difficulties for them as well to find centers able to take their children, not able to find family or friends to care for their children. Or simply not wanting to go that route and wait for a center to open. It was taking some women out of the workforce and as a once single mom many years prior to meeting her fiance she knew the hardships of trying to make it financially if women are not able to work. How critical the workforce can be not only just financially, but also socially, emotionally, and mentally. Ashley struggled to accept that mothers had to choose between being a mother or working, and that they couldn't do both. It felt reminiscent of times prior to women's rights.

Ashley and her Office Manager for AMK Cleaning, Karen, had attended the Eau Claire Chamber of Commerce 'Workforce Summit,' and soon realized how severe the daycare crisis was and how much more severe it would get in the coming years. It was then that the two decided to return to the idea of an office space with a shared daycare space for employees, but also with some other openings for others in the community needing care. From there it grew to a multiple-location concept to support the growing demand and need for adequate licensed childcare, and is still in the works to come to fruition with the help of so many local community members in all areas of resource and support to make this happen and be another piece to our local daycare crisis issues. Ashley has a passion and knack for setting up systems and processes for businesses as well as managing people and teams. She's excited to use this time now that her cleaning business has a full office team to run the business so she can work on passion projects like this, among other local area philanthropic areas, networking and connecting people. And especially helping other entrepreneurs and start-ups. She enjoys finding the right people for the job and is seeking out the best of the best for this Childcare venture!

Thank you for your continued support as we work swiftly to get set up and operating as soon as possible!

ADVISORY BOARD:

We're currently looking for individuals for an Advisory Board for our continued success with this start-up: admin@DevelopmentalMilestonesChildcare.com