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Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survi

Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of themselves. I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering and shrinking away. Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations becoming dysfunctional, but not dying because they have sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their replacements become large organizations.

mediaman 1y ago
The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes. The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession"). One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.
- deleted 1y ago
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- simpaticoder 1y ago
  There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!
  - doctorpangloss 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - simpaticoder 1y ago
      I associate the Hacker News forum with authentic, reasoned debate and sharing of personal experience and perspective. Your comment wants to engage in a kind of rhetorical pugilism that is very common in other forums, but is uncommon here. It is a style I personally dislike and find counter-productive for every topic, inflaming emotions and driving division rather than synthesizing a variety of perspectives into an interesting whole.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - viridian 1y ago
biophysboy 1y ago
Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards. I think technology has reduced the need for economic/political actors to organize via hyper-local blocks.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- huem0n 1y ago
  Agreed. Why ask the local carpenter, or librarian how to do something when it can be Googled or find a YouTube video of it? Communities gathered to solve problems they couldn't solve alone. We still can't solve them alone (we need big tech), and big tech is preferred because its lower friction. Ex: calling an Uber is often lower friction than asking a friend to pickup your groceries when your car is broken.
CalRobert 1y ago
I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    True, part of why we left the US to raise our kids
  - AppleBananaPie 1y ago
    Part of it was older kids looking after younger ones which just isn't a thing anymore as far as I can tell.
    - grues-dinner 1y ago
      You have to have at least two kids for that, and with a big enough age difference for it to work. And if it goes wrong you can get prosecuted for that and/or dragged through public infamy. In fact even if it doesn't go wrong you can probably still be reported for it. Which is presumably a very good thing for child safety, but obviously there are these downstream effects. Another similar thought was the theory that car seat laws act to cap more families at two children because with three, you can't legally fit both parents and the children into a normal car.
      - CalRobert 1y ago
        It’s doable with a few specialist car seats but not convenient. Maybe we should bring back 3 row vehicles. I loved the rear facing back seats in my Volvo wagon
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed. What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore. We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000. MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.
- masfuerte 1y ago
  I mostly agree, but is it cyclical? There doesn't seem to be any force pushing back against this social atomization.
  - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
    Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which is about how the memetics of human connection and organization replicate (or not). I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of organizational experience (power instead trickling top down from often far off far above offices), weakening organizational muscle & maturation of human agency. Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make & run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining opportunities to participate & organize. More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the less people do organize which results in less opportunities still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero sum grow & developer human agency.
sct202 1y ago
There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.
kansface 1y ago
People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces? One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!
Karrot_Kream 1y ago
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.
- RugnirViking 1y ago
  I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone" we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per day per capita global media consumption has something to do with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures. I think something like only turning on the internet and TV for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just encouraging better engagement outside of those times, but also causing you to demand better of the hour you do get, avoiding mindless slop. Have you ever taken a proper break from all media? Like tv, internet, phones, heck even books. You find yourself suddenly with amazing amounts of time. Some people describe being catastrophically bored but for me I just find that all those little tasks that rack up that seem like too much effort suddenly become approachable and you can check off like 6 and still have time for relaxing in some grass and just kinda chatting with passers by. I really think its that simple.
paddleon 1y ago
> And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local support groups when times get tough. Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our current social order which is tearing it apart.
ponector 1y ago
>> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good. From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation in local community. Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?
- piva00 1y ago
  > By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good. Is there a metric for community-oriented participation? It touches exactly on your point, people aren't doing communal things because screens and the internet exist, wouldn't that impact a metric of "good life"? I feel there are a lot of focus on economy metrics: consumption (prices, assortment of products, etc.), wages, employment but social metrics are lacking. How can we quantify other aspects of life that aren't immediately (or by proxy) measured on economics ones?
grogenaut 1y ago
I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people. Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area. Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area. YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it. Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year. I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  I guess the biggest one is "church". But to get into that requires accepting (or pretending to accept, I suppose) the horizontal memetic transfer of the specific denomination.
  - pants2 1y ago
    I go to church every Sunday despite having zero belief in Jesus or God as they describe him. The sermons are socially relevant and thought-provoking, the congregation is caring and fun with cool social events, and the good that they're doing in our community is inspiring. I encourage HNers to try it! Just mentally replace "God" with "Nature" and "Jesus" with "Me" in every line and you have a good framework for self-reflection and appreciation of the natural world.
    - anon7725 1y ago
      Assuming that you belong to something akin to traditional religion, do you not feel that you’re participating in bad faith (pun mostly not intended)? Others who attend church presumably assume that you share the stated beliefs?
Tiktaalik 1y ago
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born Historically at least I think we can find many examples of the opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less around social activities and more around aiding business and society. Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread the risk around and help out each other. For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks home which is associated with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have been branches all across Canada. After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after that when legalized again became much less relevant because its need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian dance.
gnulinux996 1y ago
> Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible. The more I get in contact with everything American, the more left I lean.
- cullenking 1y ago
  Preschool is just daycare with structure, so it costs more. Optional, privately owned. Nice to do 2-3 days a week for young kids to give them more social and learning opportunites. But it’s not public school, it’s usually just a small locally owned business.
  - nostrademons 1y ago
    And this was a co-op preschool, which is a special variety of private preschool (usually non-profit) where the parents are usually involved in classes with the kids and much of the maintenance of the school itself is handled through volunteerism of member families. My wife served as treasurer for the penultimate year, saw the writing on the wall, and then turned the position over to someone else to actually wind down the school. The model just doesn't work where we live: it requires a large number of single-income families so that one parent can be full-time involved in the kids' upbringing, and housing prices are such that single-income families cannot afford homes in the area. As a result, their market just evaporated. People just can't do it anymore.

mediaman 1y ago

The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes. The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession"). One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
simpaticoder 1y ago
There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - simpaticoder 1y ago
    I associate the Hacker News forum with authentic, reasoned debate and sharing of personal experience and perspective. Your comment wants to engage in a kind of rhetorical pugilism that is very common in other forums, but is uncommon here. It is a style I personally dislike and find counter-productive for every topic, inflaming emotions and driving division rather than synthesizing a variety of perspectives into an interesting whole.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - viridian 1y ago

biophysboy 1y ago

Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards. I think technology has reduced the need for economic/political actors to organize via hyper-local blocks.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
huem0n 1y ago
Agreed. Why ask the local carpenter, or librarian how to do something when it can be Googled or find a YouTube video of it? Communities gathered to solve problems they couldn't solve alone. We still can't solve them alone (we need big tech), and big tech is preferred because its lower friction. Ex: calling an Uber is often lower friction than asking a friend to pickup your groceries when your car is broken.

CalRobert 1y ago

I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)

grues-dinner 1y ago
Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.
- CalRobert 1y ago
  True, part of why we left the US to raise our kids
- AppleBananaPie 1y ago
  Part of it was older kids looking after younger ones which just isn't a thing anymore as far as I can tell.
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    You have to have at least two kids for that, and with a big enough age difference for it to work. And if it goes wrong you can get prosecuted for that and/or dragged through public infamy. In fact even if it doesn't go wrong you can probably still be reported for it. Which is presumably a very good thing for child safety, but obviously there are these downstream effects. Another similar thought was the theory that car seat laws act to cap more families at two children because with three, you can't legally fit both parents and the children into a normal car.
    - CalRobert 1y ago
      It’s doable with a few specialist car seats but not convenient. Maybe we should bring back 3 row vehicles. I loved the rear facing back seats in my Volvo wagon

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed. What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore. We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000. MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.

masfuerte 1y ago
I mostly agree, but is it cyclical? There doesn't seem to be any force pushing back against this social atomization.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which is about how the memetics of human connection and organization replicate (or not). I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of organizational experience (power instead trickling top down from often far off far above offices), weakening organizational muscle & maturation of human agency. Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make & run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining opportunities to participate & organize. More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the less people do organize which results in less opportunities still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero sum grow & developer human agency.

sct202 1y ago

There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.

kansface 1y ago

People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces? One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!

Karrot_Kream 1y ago

> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.

RugnirViking 1y ago
I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone" we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per day per capita global media consumption has something to do with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures. I think something like only turning on the internet and TV for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just encouraging better engagement outside of those times, but also causing you to demand better of the hour you do get, avoiding mindless slop. Have you ever taken a proper break from all media? Like tv, internet, phones, heck even books. You find yourself suddenly with amazing amounts of time. Some people describe being catastrophically bored but for me I just find that all those little tasks that rack up that seem like too much effort suddenly become approachable and you can check off like 6 and still have time for relaxing in some grass and just kinda chatting with passers by. I really think its that simple.

paddleon 1y ago

> And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local support groups when times get tough. Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our current social order which is tearing it apart.

ponector 1y ago

>> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good. From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation in local community. Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?

piva00 1y ago
> By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good. Is there a metric for community-oriented participation? It touches exactly on your point, people aren't doing communal things because screens and the internet exist, wouldn't that impact a metric of "good life"? I feel there are a lot of focus on economy metrics: consumption (prices, assortment of products, etc.), wages, employment but social metrics are lacking. How can we quantify other aspects of life that aren't immediately (or by proxy) measured on economics ones?

grogenaut 1y ago

I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people. Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area. Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area. YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it. Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year. I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.

grues-dinner 1y ago
I guess the biggest one is "church". But to get into that requires accepting (or pretending to accept, I suppose) the horizontal memetic transfer of the specific denomination.
- pants2 1y ago
  I go to church every Sunday despite having zero belief in Jesus or God as they describe him. The sermons are socially relevant and thought-provoking, the congregation is caring and fun with cool social events, and the good that they're doing in our community is inspiring. I encourage HNers to try it! Just mentally replace "God" with "Nature" and "Jesus" with "Me" in every line and you have a good framework for self-reflection and appreciation of the natural world.
  - anon7725 1y ago
    Assuming that you belong to something akin to traditional religion, do you not feel that you’re participating in bad faith (pun mostly not intended)? Others who attend church presumably assume that you share the stated beliefs?

Tiktaalik 1y ago

> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born Historically at least I think we can find many examples of the opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less around social activities and more around aiding business and society. Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread the risk around and help out each other. For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks home which is associated with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have been branches all across Canada. After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after that when legalized again became much less relevant because its need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian dance.

gnulinux996 1y ago

> Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible. The more I get in contact with everything American, the more left I lean.

cullenking 1y ago
Preschool is just daycare with structure, so it costs more. Optional, privately owned. Nice to do 2-3 days a week for young kids to give them more social and learning opportunites. But it’s not public school, it’s usually just a small locally owned business.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  And this was a co-op preschool, which is a special variety of private preschool (usually non-profit) where the parents are usually involved in classes with the kids and much of the maintenance of the school itself is handled through volunteerism of member families. My wife served as treasurer for the penultimate year, saw the writing on the wall, and then turned the position over to someone else to actually wind down the school. The model just doesn't work where we live: it requires a large number of single-income families so that one parent can be full-time involved in the kids' upbringing, and housing prices are such that single-income families cannot afford homes in the area. As a result, their market just evaporated. People just can't do it anymore.