By Hattori Atsuko and Yoshitaka Okada | Secretary General and Board Representative, DSIA
“Redevelopment takes too long.” is the word expressed by Ms. Masato Ito, who leads and helps the redevelopment of “Kirarin Kids (KK)” and Rikuzen-takata City respectively. At the end of March 2017, the present lease of the “Kirarin Kids’ space” in the temporary shop arcade with the Rikuzen-takata City expires, and the renewal of the contract will be with the private sector, instead of the city government. It means a big change to KK in many aspects, since it is now forced to choose either to leave the present place and find an alternative location or to renew a contract with a much higher monthly rent and a monthly payment for the future removal of the present complex. This change will really influence the future of KK, since it needs to have a fairly big play space for children which is not easily available, needless to say about the lack of financial resource to keep the present location. Besides, to find a space in the city center which was completely destroyed in the disaster may take several more years to be completed. KK is facing a really serious difficulty to find a solution.
Despite this painful worry, Ms. Ito is working very hard to promote good and warm parent-children relations and offer many programs and events. So far, the main source of funding has been a subsidy from the city government. But since she is trying to serve the needs of the community, she ends up offering new programs which become additional financial burden. A relief for Ms. Ito is that staffs are highly motivated and well willing to work together to sustain the KK.
Their programs have two effects: One is to support parents to raise children. For example, they offer such programs as bouquet-making classes or meetings to learn how to correct pelvis and overcome after-childbirth effects conducted by a midwife. These programs are quite popular to mothers. The other is to promote human relations and help to improve living in the community. For example, this year for the first time, KK participated in the Challenge Day in Sport. This event was to compete, in terms of the community-based participation time and rate, in a paired city, which was between Rikuzen-takata City and Miyako-town in Fukuoka City this year. KK requested two voluntary mothers’ circles to participate, and successfully raised the motivation of mothers and their participation. Owing to such efforts, Rikuzen-takata City won against Miyako-town. Also, in June, to celebrate the fourth year of the Temporary Arcade in which the KK is in, they took an initiative to organize an anniversary event to re-think about the disaster-prevention practices. As these initiatives show, the KK’s recent activities are to act in areas where nobody challenges and also on issues which add new elements to the existing programs. Several newspaper articles about these challenges appeared (see the picture).
In July, KK will organize a summer festival to enjoy cool evening breeze. It has already become one well-known event which many local people participate and enjoy. Many outside organizations which KK has worked with and student volunteers dispatched by universities will participate. Especially, university student volunteers learn about the disaster and redevelopment and also the joy of volunteering to play with children.
Successes of these events are greatly owing to staffs’ willingness and high motivation to realize their goals. Despite the tightness of helping hands caused by maternity leaves, instead of hiring short-term part-timers, they try to manage by staffs who commit for a long-term. This is partly because people in the community pay special attention to reasons for staff’s job hopping from one job to another. This situation keeps each staff extremely busy all the time. How to sustainably operate an organization is a tormenting issue to Ms. Ito. This issue raised three questions: (1) what should be KK’s staff structure and their work assignments; (2) how to organize programs and events with this limited number of staff and also to expand the operation of KK; and (3) how to hire capable people and train them as staffs. Looking for answers to these questions, Ms. Ito, for the first time, decided to attend a conference for the leaders of childcare centers held in Tokyo. Although she is still extremely busy, she now started thinking about KK’s sustainability or, to say in different words, feeling real pressure to think about the issue.
In addition to the above conference, Ms. Ito, also for the first time, decided to attend a local network of childcare-related organizations. This network was originally organized by people from outside of Rikuzen-taka City. Although many of these outside organizations left the community, a few remaining ones continued to operate this network. Although Ms. Ito previously did not have any time to be involved in the network, she now hopes to build new movements with people in the network to improve childcare situations in Rikuzen-taka City.
KK constantly has a firm posture to break away from the present restrictions and looks for new ideas and directions. Through these attempts, Ms. Ito will definitely find solutions to above problems in the near future.
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