Afterschool Activities

OCCA after-school activities are available for kids In K~12 years old.
Our major goal is to support your children in exploring their interests during our childcare services and care for them after school before parents finish work.

For more information, please visit our website occachildcare.ca

The After-School Childcare includes the Multicultural Homework Club (HWC), Immigrant Parenting Forum (IPF), and various heritage classes. The OCCA children’s weekend heritage activities started in 2011 which attracted most of our members. Since 2014, we rented a year-round operation site which made it possible to develop a weekday program. Having someplace for kids to go from 2:30 pm to whenever parents get off work is a problem that many families face, not just immigrant parents. The uniqueness of our program is to fill the gap by addressing the special issues of immigrants and visible minorities. For example, tutorial sessions on English grammar/homework, physical activities with heritage components, and their parents’ heritage and languages.

The HWC and IPF were started by former Kelowna Koyukai (Japanese immigrant group) in 2015 and were developed for multicultural activities by the former Okanagan Immigrant Collective Society. In 2018, supported by the OCCA’s charity status, the HWC and IPF received project funds of $13,500 from the City Social Development Grants and $13,464 from the Central Okanagan Foundation. Legally, these funds were granted to the OCCA and subcontracted for program management. Most activities were held at the OCCA site with attendants of Korean, Japanese, and Syrian immigrants. In Dec 2019, the OIC dissolved its operation and transferred the activities and staff to the OCCA After School program. In 2020-2021, all children’s activities were on hold due to the pandemic site closing and lower fund level while the IPF remained partial online sessions. Attributed to the UBCO student volunteer and fund support, the program re-started on Feb.7 in full strength and five days per week. We are making an effort to add weekend activities upon the obvious demand from parents working on weekends.

We are grateful to the following funding agencies for making this program possible:

Current

Province of British Columbia
Central Okanagan Foundation
City of Kelowna

Past:
University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus

Telus Friendly Future Foundation

Province of British Columbia (2018- present)

Canada Post Community Foundation (2020-2021)

Vancouver Foundation / Level Youth (2020-2021)