Hannah Wheeler has a bold vision to transform childcare in her hometown of Lucknow, Ontario. The 2020 McCall Huron County Scholarship Recipient currently runs The Aaniin Collective, offering holistic, family-centred care.
“A lot of other childcare businesses really focus only on the child; I wanted to reimagine that as a more well-rounded service for families, because we can work all day long, but if the parents are unsupported, then that means the children are unsupported for all those hours that they’re at home.”
At Aaniin, Hannah goes beyond 9-to-5 childcare to offer parents programming that supports their well-being, builds spaces for families to connect, and shares useful resources that can help them navigate their child’s needs as they grow. These supports are especially critical for families in rural communities, where services are few, distant, and frequently under-resourced.
Hannah first witnessed these gaps while in high school, when she spent most of her time babysitting for families in her neighbourhood.
“Babysitting was a job, but it really helped me get connected with the community.” Specifically, she saw how limited resources affected everyone, not just parents, and began to volunteer and advocate for community well-being.
At F.E. Madill Secondary School, Hannah championed student issues through the school’s Student Council and the Avon Maitland District School Board Student Senate, launching a mental health awareness week to promote well-being and coping strategies among students. Outside of school, she volunteered with Mental Health Matters Wingham, supporting community training and building resources for those stuck on waitlists for clinical care.
Raised in a family of entrepreneurs, Hannah also built an early appreciation for taking initiative. When she heard that a local community hall was slated to be torn down due to lack of use, she joined a volunteer committee to raise funds and mobilize support to renovate the building so it could be used for community events again.
In her final year of high school, she came across the McCall Huron County Scholarship and found it to be a unique proposition.
“I really appreciated that it considered you as a person and not just your grades. Although I did well academically, I was never top of my class. What’s important to me is that we can take things out of academics and apply them to life. And the scholarship really highlighted that: What’s your hope for post-secondary? How are you going to pull from these experiences that you’ve had with academics and volunteering to improve things around you?” Hannah says.
Although Hannah carried this enthusiasm for making a difference to the University of Guelph, where she enrolled in the child studies program, she was met with challenges stemming from the pandemic.
“I was a 2020 first-year, and opportunities weren’t available in the same capacity. You couldn’t even have the typical student club fairs and things like that.”
With the absence of opportunities on campus, Hannah continued to stay involved in initiatives back in Huron County. “I really dug into volunteering opportunities in my hometown for those first few years because I didn’t want to lose that,” she says. She helped build a playground for St. Helen’s Hall, the local community centre she helped save, and served on its Board to help manage its operations.
Pandemic or not, Hannah admits it can be quite challenging to transition to a new community. “In Huron County, you always have people around you who know you and support you. That can make stepping out into post-secondary nerve-wracking,” she says.
During that time, she found the regular check-ins from the scholarship program staff to be reassuring. “I vividly remember the scholarship sending out emails during the lockdown being like, ‘we’d love to chat and see how things are going’,” she says. “Knowing that someone was there to check in each semester was huge.”
Eventually, as restrictions eased, Hannah went hunting for opportunities on campus. She volunteered with the University of Guelph’s College Royal Society, helping organize an open house for the Guelph community. She also started to provide nannying services to families in Guelph.
“I did a lot of walking around the campus, a lot of walking around the city,” she says. “I know that we can tend to only look at our university emails and social media, but there are a lot of posters around campus, and just listening to conversations that people are having, and stopping and talking to them and having that real human interaction could lead to great opportunities.”
That strategy helped Hannah leverage her nannying connections to meet an informal group of Guelph mothers who came together to organize events for families, where she learned more about supports for young families in a more urban context. This eventually connected her to the local EarlyON centre, where she initially volunteered at events and later ended up doing a placement.
With her degree and her Early Childhood Educator licence, which she earned simultaneously, Hannah was sure of her next move. She knew she wanted to inspire a different approach to childcare, and the way to get there had to be through her own venture. Although she currently cares for only six children, in line with provincial guidelines, she has more than 40 on her waitlist. She hopes to grow The Aaniin Collective to include more staff and centres.
Hannah credits the scholarship with unlocking opportunities to learn and grow. “There’s a huge piece to be said about when you’re worrying about something else, how able you are to focus on what’s at hand. The scholarship helped me ease into and do better across my program.”
She’s still in touch with the scholarship community and recently returned as a volunteer for selection interviews that are held each year in Huron County.
“What I would tell applicants is to be themselves. The scholarship wants to know who you are, and you’ve already put in the hard work, which was showing up consistently with your volunteer work and your academics, building your name in the community so that they would want to be a reference for you; the work you put in daily was the hard work. Don’t try to show up as anything more or less.”