After the birth of her last child, Alicia Mahoney decided that she wouldn’t be going back to her job working with at-risk youth in Vancouver, because she couldn’t envision managing such an all-consuming job and a young child. “If I had to give the kids at work 110 per cent,” she says, “how would I be able to come home and have anything left to give to my child?”
As she was setting up a nursery and shopping her way through a laundry list of all the things that a new baby needs, she realized that there were no children’s shops in her local neighbourhood. “How come there’s nothing in New West for kids?” she asked herself.