Alvarez – Tumiralaat child care centre

Tumiralaat was a childcare centre that was started in 2008 for supporting children through city subsidies and supporting the parents who are trying to get back to an education, improving their education or wanting to join the working force.   

Tumiralaat has been now operating a toddler program starting at 18 months of age, a pre-school program and we run concurrently with a kindergarten program that we do in partnership with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. 

What makes the centre unique is that we are Inuit specific. We are serving Inuit families that have come here from the four different regions that make up the Nunaat, the land-based claims that have been awarded to Labrador, Northern Quebec, Baffin and the Northwest Territories area. And we work with different dialects but we try and serve the families as best we can in an urban centre that’s basically surrounded by a mainstream culture. So our importance is to keep the culture strong, try and keep the language strong, trying to keep our families strong.