 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us. Bemidji Area officials will be spending the next year finding ways to bring more child care options to the growing city. Reporter Cheryl Moore tells us about the new World Child Care Initiative. Right now in the Bemidji Area, we're over 500 child care slots short of where we'd like to be. And that number is growing. Well Terry Coney wanted to be at the forefront of child care initiatives so we'll call together a bunch of community leaders to talk about this and kind of get this moving for a lot of reasons. For one, we are a large employer with many, many young parents and so it's significant to us that those parents have solid, dependable day care. Bemidji is joining forces with First Children's Finances to become a part of the Rural Child Care Innovation Program. It's a competitive process and Bemidji was one of the communities that was chosen in Minnesota this year. It's an intensive program that lasts somewhere between 12 and 18 months. The program is meant to uncover problems in the area and create solutions that will solve them. Every community is a little bit different. We do surveys with the communities to find out what's the true problem? What are the true needs around child care in Bemidji? The program will now develop a core team of around 20 community leaders. This child care initiative is bringing together businesses from large and small, different philanthropy organizations, the Beltrami County Human Services, so that we're all kind of working together to figure out how do we expand that child care base. Over the next year, the core team will host community events as a way to get others involved. When that time is over, they'll figure out what will be the next best steps to take. I would like to think that at next year we have not only increased the capacity for new day care providers, for day care centers, but that we've propped up our current providers. We've got some very, very good current day care providers. And from an economic development standpoint, we need that. If we're bringing business to the area our companies are expanding, we want to make sure that our employees are taken care of with housing and child care and those options. Reporting in Bemidji, Shremor, Lakeland News. The group is tentatively looking to schedule their first community event for some time in March. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.