Born from tragedy, Great Falls nonprofit Toby’s House provides free child care for families in need

Matt Hudson, Montana Free Press, 10/27/25

Sarah Willis arrived in Great Falls in early 2024 with her husband and a new daughter, but none of their stuff.

A military family, Willis’ husband had received orders to move from Florida to Montana, but the moving company lost their belongings en route to Malmstrom Air Force Base. In a new state with no nearby family or friends, the new parents tried to settle in with their weeks-old baby.

Her husband traveled often for his military service, and Willis struggled in the all-consuming, exhausting and around-the-clock care of her new daughter. The base’s child care center was always full. The baby cried often. Willis did, too.

Willis said she knew about postpartum depression before giving birth. Feeling it, though, was something entirely different.

“Around month three, I got really bad postpartum [depression],” Willis, now 26, told Montana Free Press. “And it’s so much darker than I think people think it is. If it’s something you haven’t gone through, there’s no way to measure how bad it gets.”

One night, Willis thought she was close to a breaking point. Sitting on the floor, she fought against violent, intrusive thoughts. She turned to Google, seeking some kind of solution — advice, helpful stories, anything — from the internet.

Among the results was a listing for Toby’s House Crisis Nursery, a no-cost child care service in Great Falls that specializes in emergency care. She second-guessed the website. She wondered, is something like this really available in this far-flung corner of the country?

“It was a Sunday, and I was desperate, so I called anyway,” Willis said. “A woman picked up, and I started crying.”

The woman on the phone said the center wasn’t usually open on Sundays. But she met Willis in 20 minutes and took her daughter for a couple of hours. That’s how Willis discovered Toby’s House, which has operated in Great Falls since 2020 and is soon moving into a new building.

That’s also how Willis found a bit of respite for the first time in a long time.

“I slept,” she said. “I showered.”

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

The scarcity and expense of child care have had broad impacts on working-class families in Montana. The latest data from the Montana Department of Labor and Industry indicate that more than half of the state’s counties are “child care deserts,” meaning supply meets less than a third of the need. The department estimates that some 63,000 Montana parents are unable to hold a job because they can’t secure affordable child care.

In Cascade County, child care centers can meet just 71% of the area demand, according to the state data, and a 2021 study commissioned by the Great Falls Development Alliance described a “severe shortage” of child care capacity in Great Falls with an estimated 580 children in need of child care that wasn’t available.

Toby’s House fills a specific need in that landscape. Most of the parents served by the center are working people who lack a support system, such as family members or trusted friends. Without a safety net, they face a choice between parenting a child and meeting obligations for work, school or their own health.

“One of the biggest needs was helping families care for their children so that the parents could attend a mental health appointment, like a counseling appointment,” said Susie Zeak, who was executive director of Toby’s House from 2020 to 2024. “Going to the doctor’s office. Going to the food stamp office, which, to you, may not seem like a crisis. But what happens is when parents get overwhelmed, when they get frustrated, they take out those actions on their children.”

Toby’s House opened in Great Falls in 2020 with the goal of diverting parents and their children from those destabilizing and potentially violent situations. Although relatively small, the center has steadily expanded over the last five years and has outgrown its current location along Fifth Street in downtown Great Falls.

When Zeak took over in 2020, she assumed a demanding schedule. The center was open during the week from 8 in the morning until midnight with a staff of five and a capacity for 12 children. She’d work some weekends when needed.

Zeak had three kids by the age of 22 and lived through lean times. Now in her 40s, working as a child care professional, she saw how delicate the balance of work and parenthood can be without a trusted safety net for the child and a respite for the parent.

“At Toby’s House, we just wanted to be their village,” Zeak said. “We wanted to make sure people knew that you have someplace to turn.”

Last year, Araceli Rodriguez found herself without a village. She moved to Great Falls with her 7-month-old daughter and boyfriend while going to nursing school. Apartment searches fell through, but a friend gave them a camper, and they stayed at the KOA for six months.

Between 40 hours of classes and 180 hours of clinical rotations each semester, Rodriguez was busy and couldn’t afford traditional child care.

“At the time, I was doing online [classes],” said Rodriguez, 28. “And my ex wasn’t really helping me watch her, so I was in this situation where I was struggling to do school and do clinicals and didn’t have support.”

She turned to Toby’s House after a colleague referred her. She said it was tough to ask for help, but she thought she’d just see what they could do. It turned out that the center was able to provide full-time child care, which freed her up to take some in-person classes and complete the clinical rotations.

In February, Rodriguez left her boyfriend and what she described as a bad situation. She said Toby’s House helped put her in touch with the YWCA, where she stayed for a few months while between housing.

Last May, Rodriguez graduated with a nursing degree and began working full-time in July. Her daughter, now almost 2, is in a different daycare center, but they return to Toby’s House every now and again.

Filling that child care need was transformational. She said she owes her degree to the support she got from Toby’s House.

“I was just in school trying to be a mom. I had a lot,” Rodriguez said. “So now that I’m finished with school, everything has calmed down now. I’m on my feet. I can support my daughter on my own.”

NO DAY IS THE SAME

Naptime was nearly over last Tuesday when the car crashed into Toby’s House. A driver on the adjacent one-way street made a lane change in front of another vehicle. The woman driving the second vehicle swerved, crashing through the fence, over the front deck and into the southwest corner of the building.

Inside the room where the car hit, a child was napping in a crib. A staff member was sitting nearby.

No one was hurt in the crash. Glass fell onto the child’s face, and the staff was shaken the next day as Leesha Ford, a longtime board member and current executive director, continued a marathon of calls to insurers, child care licensors, volunteers and parents.

“I’m OK. I feel like it’s been a lot,” Ford said Wednesday afternoon. “But I’m grateful.”

The “what-ifs” lingered after the crash. Staff had debated taking the kids out front for playtime, which would have put them in the path of the vehicle. 

Shortly after the crash, the building’s owner, a construction contractor, was on site with stabilizing beams and wood boards. Ford said she received approval from licensors to send some of the older kids to Peace Place, a nearby family respite center. A small number of children were able to come to Toby’s House in a room upstairs. A flooring contractor has pledged to donate flooring and had already visited to take measurements.

With repairs underway, Ford hoped to be operating at limited capacity this week.

Absent a sudden emergency, typical child care at Toby’s House runs on an atypical schedule. It’s licensed as a traditional child care center, but there’s a different group of kids from day to day.

Because the center has a short-term, drop-in care model, some kids are there for an hour or two so parents can make appointments. Ford said she’s had a mother drop off her child and then go take a nap in her car. Other parents work evening shifts and take advantage of the late operating hours, which are uncommon among area child care centers.

It’s rare for a child to attend Toby’s House consistently for more than several months, unlike a traditional daycare facility.

“Our intention isn’t to be that,” Ford said. “We do less child care and more crisis intervention. More emotional intervention rather than preschool.”

Children who are there for months are often waiting for placement in a more traditional full-time child care center, Ford said. That’s often Head Start, the federally subsidized program run in Great Falls by Opportunities, Inc.

For other parents who need to work, Toby’s House is a fallback option when the regular day care center closes. While the center’s mission is to divert children away from an acute crisis, that’s not the norm.

“It’s very rare that we have someone come in and say, ‘I might hurt my child,'” Ford said.

Some kids attend Toby’s House through a Best Beginnings scholarship, an income-restricted state reimbursement program. Child care remains free for the parents, and the scholarship can be a minor source of revenue for Toby’s House, a nonprofit organization. Securing approval through Best Beginnings is also a step toward placement in a long-term facility, such as Head Start, Ford said.

Kim Stull is executive director of Family Connections, an organization that administers Best Beginnings in 33 Montana counties. She told MTFP in an email that the organization serves 2,100 families in those counties.

Stull said that Toby’s House has industry peers that offer drop-in respite care. But its unique offering is being a drop-in center that’s free of charge to parents. Ford regularly works with parents who can’t afford traditional daycare.

Toby’s House surveys the parents it serves to assess their needs. One in three parents surveyed used less baby formula than is recommended to try and stretch their supply before the next purchase, Ford said. One in two parents extends their baby’s time in a dirty diaper to try and use fewer.

As a result, Toby’s House also serves as a donation center where parents can pick up diapers, wipes, formula and other items. Staff members, particularly Ford, work with parents on a range of needs. One parent, a single dad with two children and two jobs, told MTFP that Ford helped him work on his parenting skills and referred him to home rental agencies. Recently, Ford was on the phone with a parent trying to secure gas and food money as they were coming back from Washington state. After that call, she shared a story about working with another parent to navigate Medicaid paperwork to get coverage for a specialized medication. They started the process in July, and Ford said the medication was just approved by insurance in October.

“The unseen part, what we do in addition to child care, is how can we connect people to resources?” Ford said.

While traditional daycare centers charge a fee per child, Toby’s House relies on donations and grants to support its operation. The center has been successful in growing its revenue since first opening, according to tax disclosures. Its revenue of about $390,000 in 2023 was more than three times what it raised in 2020.

Most of the money goes toward labor. Child care has notoriously small margins, which lead to low wages across the industry. As one report from the Montana Budget and Policy Center put it, “child care workers in Montana do not earn wages that reflect the value of their caregiving work, resulting in difficulty recruiting and retaining a child care workforce.”

Ford said Toby’s House has added part-time workers to meet the need this year. That staff includes Willis, the parent who found Toby’s House in a Google search. She started in June after leaving other jobs that felt unsatisfactory.

Typically, there will be two caregivers on staff during the daytime and two for the evening shift. It can be tough to predict the number of kids each day due to the center’s drop-in model, although they have recently been at or near capacity. 

“We have been full, full, full every single day,” Ford said in September.

A NEW BEGINNING

Toby’s House is a licensed child care facility with a capacity of 12 children. The center’s current building, a rented home that was once a duplex, leaves little room for more.

“This is an older building,” Ford said. “You can see where one of the struggles we have is it’s multilevel. That takes adjusting on staffing and our ability, the square-footage limits on how many children we can have.”

Ford laughed when asked about mealtime in the small kitchen. Kids sit around a table that Ford found on Facebook Marketplace years ago. It suits the need, but there isn’t room for the refrigerator to open while the table is full.

The limited space can be heartbreaking for a crisis child care center. It can take weeks for a spot to open during especially busy times. Willis said she’s had to tell a parent “no” even when she knows how troubling a situation can be.

“There’s nothing worse when you’re at full capacity with the kids and a crying mother calls,” she said.

Toby’s House has been working to expand, and this year the pieces began falling into place. In August, Ford petitioned Great Falls officials to donate a portion of Carter Park as the site of a new Toby’s House. Jim Filipowicz, general manager of Steel Etc. and a longtime community benefactor, was at the meeting and made multiple offers to help move the proposal forward.

In his first turn at the microphone at that August meeting, he made his commitment known to the city commission.

“My name is Jim Filipowicz. My wife is Debbie Filipowicz. My wife and I are willing to put in a half million [dollars] plus,” he said.

While the Carter Park proposal didn’t get off the ground, Toby’s House soon received a donation of land for a new site. Work is now underway on a 22,000-square-foot lot along Second Street South and Seventh Avenue.

A concert of private donors, contractors and community members is making it possible for Toby’s House to build a new facility with greater capacity. Filipowicz remains a steadfast supporter. Ford said the project manager for the project heard about Toby’s House while in town for a rodeo and threw himself into it.

“Basically got buy-in,” Ford said. “He said, ‘How about Toby’s House? What can we do for them?'”

The construction budget, she added, is being fully donated, either in materials or gifted labor.

Design plans are still coming together, and it’s not yet known what the new capacity will be, but Ford said the hope is to accommodate at least 25 children. The new building will feature safe, contained green space for kids to play and more indoor space to serve more kids and their families. Willis said that it will be great to have more age-specific spaces tailored for the children.

“In the new building, there will be enough rooms and enough staff so that the kids can be separated into age groups and have age-appropriate activities,” she said.

If the funding, donated labor, weather and other factors align, Toby’s House hopes to reopen in the new space in 2026.

THE REALITY OF CRISIS CHILD CARE

Last spring, Ford laughed when a child asked if they could meet Toby. After all, they were at Toby’s House.

It was a nice moment, but it calls to mind a darker reality that’s at the core of the center’s mission. 

Toby’s House is named for October “Toby” Perez, who was 2 years old and living in Great Falls when doctors pronounced her dead from blunt-force trauma and brain swelling. An autopsy found multiple fractures in her spine that appeared to be from different incidents. Perez was killed by her mother’s boyfriend, who was watching the child on June 23, 2011, the night she was abused for the last time.

During those years, such grim cases were not uncommon in Great Falls. Perez’s death came a year after the case of 3-year-old Kaelyn Bray, who died from abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend.

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And one month after Perez died, 1-year-old Keira Hulbert died from brain injuries caused by her mother’s boyfriend. The Great Falls Tribune reported in July 2011 that six people had pending court cases for felony child abuse, endangerment or homicide in just the previous six weeks. The victims in all the cases were under 3 years old.

One recent civil lawsuit showed how violence can slip through the state’s child abuse enforcement system. In July, a jury awarded $11.2 million to a Great Falls girl who was assaulted in 2009 by her father’s girlfriend. The assault left the girl blind and with other lifelong medical needs.

The jury in that case found that the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services’ Child and Family Services Division was negligent in its investigation and failed to intervene and remove the girl from harm’s way.

While Toby’s House serves parents in relatively stable situations who need additional help, the staff also sees parents living through trauma or in bad situations. During her time as director, Zeak told news outlets in 2021 that 30% of their kids have experienced some kind of domestic violence. Ford said this year that figure is closer to 40%.

Ford said that one of the biggest hurdles is getting parents in the door without shame or the fear of judgment when they’re often facing other challenges.

“It’s hard when people are depressed to advocate for themselves and have energy to call into appointments, follow up on things,” Ford said.

Clear cases of abuse must be reported to the department of family services, but Ford said they try to do it with the parent involved if possible. The goal is not to ambush a parent in making that report. But those situations are rare, Ford said. She aims to limit the barriers of paperwork and questions for new parents, who don’t need to show an ID to bring in their child, for example.

It can be tough work. Sometimes, when a child leaves the center, Willis doesn’t know if they are going to be totally safe. But now, having met more of those parents, she has come to understand how fragile stability can be, no matter someone’s intentions. Willis said she has learned how important it is to suspend judgment.

What Willis can control is the kids’ experiences at the center.

“What I love is that when we’re there, all of the staff is loving,” she said.” We’re going to give you a hot meal. We’re going to give you [stuffed] animals.”

Zeak echoed the weight that the job can bring, emotionally and physically. Some days, she said, she was exhausted by the time she got home to her own family. When Zeak resigned, she thought in part about making the best decision for her family with the choices available to her.

Looking back, she remembers the parents from Toby’s House trying to do the same for their families.

“The main thing I took away was that parents really love their children,” Zeak said. “They just don’t have a lot of resources. They don’t have a village. And I think Toby’s House fills that void of a village for a lot of people. It is an essential service. It really is.”