UNOW Day Nursery
Origin Story
Told in the voices of the women who founded the UNOW Day Nursery: women who were activists with the National Organization for Women in 1970, and the women who were tasked by a conservative, all-male Ivy League University in the process of transitioning to coeducation to welcome the incoming first class of female undergraduates. This is the story of how these women came together to form a daycare that has been so important to hundreds of families over the 50 years of its operation.
I served as a trustee on the board 2019-22 and co-director of the UNOW and Then Oral History project. Our mandate was to take the materials already painstakingly amassed by the founding committee and curate and display these materials so that they could be accessed and enjoyed by the community as well as used as marketing for scholarship fundraising to improve access to quality daycare. I volunteered to make a short video how the daycare was started over 50 years ago in 1970.
I used some animated grain, line boil, a blocky typeface reminiscent of sponge printing or magnetic letters, and linear drawings to unify all the animated pieces.
Luckily, I was able to get some b-roll of children in the playground before the pandemic shut the daycare down for a few months and before the daycare reopened with new safety protocols—including not allowing any adults who were not staff into the building—in place. The audio was rich: there were some great interviews done with some of the founders, from which I chose a few voices to tell the story, as chronologically as possible. The visuals were a bit repetitive: b-roll of kids playing, a slideshow of vintage photos from the ‘70s, typed minutes of meetings, and newspaper clippings, which I knew would not fill the 20 minutes of audio I had just edited. Animated sequences to the rescue!
The documentary was a labor of love, done on weekends and evenings, my first very long animated project. It’s been suggested to me (by extremely kind, supportive people) that I should promote the video to various national parent-focused media. I have some thoughts about that—I made the video for an extremely small, niche audience and to make the appeal broader, I would expand it by adding talking head interview footage of high-profile women who can speak to the role daycare played in their lives as well as on a larger institutional level. I would also add statistics about rates of the participation in the workforce of women who have children, maybe open with scenes of the harried routine of a family with a few preschool-aged children.
