Vail Resorts/Courtesy Photo
The Vail Valley Foundation is offering a unique opportunity to take home part of Vail Mountain.
Starting on Friday, July 7, at 8 a.m., the nonprofit will be auctioning off 65 chairs — 25 triples and 40 quads — from the resort to support its burgeoning child care initiative. The online auction will end on Sunday, July 9, at 5 p.m. and all chairlifts will need to be picked up in person in Minturn on Monday, July 17.
“We were so grateful that Vail Mountain, through the EpicPromise Foundation, chose the Vail Valley Foundation to be a recipient of their chairlifts with the replacement of Chair 17 and some extra chairs they had on their lot,” said Sarah Franke, the senior vice president of operations at the Vail Valley Foundation.
“They do these pretty infrequently — it’s the first time in this valley for quite a while — and they selected the Vail Valley Foundation and our child care initiative to be the recipient of all of the funds from this auction.”
John Plack, a spokesperson for Vail Mountain, said that not only are the resort and EpicPromise “always looking for creative partnerships that benefit our community,” but that the current “availability and affordability of child care deeply impacts our community and workforce.”
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“We’ve been longtime partners with the Vail Valley Foundation, and we deeply align with their ‘big-idea’ mentality that enriches and benefits our Valley,” Plack said.
In the last year, Vail Valley Foundation launched this child care initiative — also known as the Eagle River Valley Childcare Initiative — to fulfill a pressing and growing need in the local community.
“The Vail Valley Foundation, for its entire existence, has had a most visible focus on arts, athletics and education. And in the last couple of years as an organization, we’ve been looking back to its roots of community, looking at the unique needs of our region and exploring how we can help be part of that solution,” said Sierra Adams, the nonprofit’s vice president of philanthropy.
Within this exploration, Adams said the organization identified child care — and specifically early child care education for children ages 5 and younger — as one of the community’s greatest needs.
“As we looked at child care needs in this valley, some of the biggest hurdles that we saw for community members were the cost, the availability, the proximity to their home or their work location,” Adams said.
The initiative’s main goal is to “build incremental, accessible and affordable child care facilities, hopefully across our valley.”
So far, the organization has been working on planning its first facility in Avon where it hopes to bring approximately 12 classrooms, supporting anywhere from 150 to 200 of these early childhood students, Adams said.
Avon, she added, was a “real child care desert as we looked at the whole valley in terms of what offerings were available.”
Currently, the foundation is working alongside the town of Avon on the initial plans for the facility on the identified site. The site, which is an approximately 4-acre plot of land within The Village at Avon development, is across West Beaver Creek Boulevard from The Piedmont Apartments in the town.
Franke said that currently, they’re in the initial parts of designing the facility, working with partners to determine not only how it can maximize the space available, but also “serve as many kids as possible in a viable space for them.”
The concept for the early childhood center is that it would be operated as an “employer-sponsored child care model where local businesses can opt-in as a benefit to their employees to subsidize a meaningful portion of their monthly child care expenses,” Adams said.
“We know that there’s a lot of important and meaningful child care providers in this valley, and we are hoping to just be one additional one who can work with our local employers to really serve the workforce here, and in Avon to start with,” she added.
As the initiative forges ahead, it is hoping to develop the first center in Avon, perfect this model, and then replicate it throughout the valley, Adams said.
The initiative did recently receive a $500,000 grant from the State of Colorado’s Department of Early Childhood, which enabled it to start moving the process forward. However, as it looks to the future, Friday’s chairlift auction will also provide critical funds for the Avon project.
“We hope that people see this as a great cause that they want to support in addition to getting a piece of Vail Mountain’s history to own, Adams said, adding that the ultimate goal is to “raise as much money as we can for this initiative.”
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