Rika Sato was working as a researcher in a leading educational firm when she became a mother. Even though she tried to balance working with motherhood she found she had to unfortunately leave her job due to child care problems, and the fact that her parents also lived a great distance away. Being away from work and socialising with other mothers, through blogs and meetings, she soon realised that many mothers shared the same worries. So instead she started to think about a service that could make the most of the local community.
She tried to speak to the people in her neighborhood to see if anyone could assist her, but she found that people were initially quite suspicious of her intentions. So instead she applied to a startup event sponsored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and explained her ideas here and received the winning award. She then returned to local area and found people a lot more accepting of her ideas with the official government certification and her ‘Affection’ service was born. The idea of ‘Affection’ is to make use of the retired older generations, and people with time on their hands, in the neighbourhood to assist with child support, such as picking up children from childcare, and looking after them until their parents return from work. The neighbourhood helpers ‘Grandparent teachers’ assist with giving lessons on Hiragana, Mathematics, English, and any specialist subjects that they have knowledge on. As the majority of people assisting are volunteers they have been able to keep the ‘Affection’ service reasonably priced.
At the moment the main helpers are people who have had previous experience with teaching, and results have been beyond all expectations. The relationship between the ‘Grandparent teachers’ and the students has swiftly bloomed, and they have found that many of the children actually want to more regularly meet up with their after school ‘teachers’, even on days when they do not want to attend normal kindergarten, as well as bring their ‘Grandparent teachers’ to school events. And along with this they can see that the community “connection” has grown beyond far beyond that of the original business.
The service makes the most of the seniors’ free time and skills, while helping to relieve some of the burden on working mothers, and also helping to really activate the local community and bring the different generations closer together. The benefits for the community are easy to see and hopefully will spread far out into the future.
