About this Animation
Babysitting cooperatives are the future of childcare, but right now, only 24% of parents even know babysitting cooperatives exist. A babysitting coop is a private group of parents in a community who trade babysitting with each other -- You watch my kids when I go out, I'll watch your kids when you go out. The great thing about the coop model is that you're already watching your own kids, and adding another kid isn't much extra effort.
SittingAround's mission is to make parents' lives better. We do this by making high quality, convenient, community-based childcare -- babysitting cooperatives -- easy to start, grow, and manage. In our small way, we want to change society for the better, and to do so we need people to help us spread the word.
SittingAround.com began limited testing on March 7, 2011 and we opened our doors to the public on May 31, 2011. Since then, the number of coops coordinated through our site has grown rapidly, and we thought this was a fun way to help users and supporters spread the word to their friends and relatives in other areas.
If you know a parent in an area that doesn't have any dots (or even one that has a lot!), send them this animation and clue them in to this growing movement in childcare. SittingAround makes coordinating a babysitting coop simple, and with our recently introduced free accounts, there should be a coop in every neighborhood!
If you have just created a coop, it can take up to 6 hours for your coop to show up on this map. Coop is pronounced as if it were written co-op. Babysitting coops are also known as babysitting swaps, babysitter exchanges, and childcare cooperatives. This animation was inspired by a variety of Growth of Walmart videos. This video by Flowing Data is among the best.