WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP: CHILD CARE
Here in the Capital Region, SMUD
recently announced a new partner-
ship with UC Davis Health and Sac-
ramento State to provide a new child
care facility on the Sac State campus
for more than 200 children. The part-
nership will expand and transition the
independently owned and operat-
ed Lighthouse Child Development
Center, which has been in operation
since 1991 and is currently located on
SMUD’s campus on S Street. When
the new building opens in early 2021,
it will double the capacity, and all
enrolled at Lighthouse — the majority
are children of SMUD employees —
will be guaranteed a space. The re-
maining spaces will be made available
to the children of employees at SMUD,
UC Davis and Sacramento State.
Sarah Sciandri, 38, a mother of two
who works as a senior public infor-
Women in Leadership Profile
Nor-Cal Beverage
Excellence and Expansion
The mothers of invention
O
ne of the Sacramento region’s most notable
women business leaders, Shannon Deary-
Bell is a dynamo. As president and CEO
of Nor-Cal Beverage, founded by her grandfather
in 1937, she’s guiding the company to its biggest
production year ever in 2020. Also this year, the
company will see a 425,000-square-foot expansion
at its West Sacramento facility and hire about 80
new team members.
Nor-Cal Beverage produces approximately 60
million beverage cases in good years, and this
year, it expects to produce about 78 million. “Our
growth has been exciting,” says Deary-Bell, “and
as we’ll be hiring many new people this year,
our doors of opportunity are open to everyone,
including women.”
“We always look at skill sets foremost, but we see
more skilled women looking for bigger positions in
many fields now,” she says. “That gives us a bigger
pool to choose from and enables us to hire more
women. Now is a great time for women in business.”
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mation specialist at SMUD, has been
taking advantage of the child care
program there since she started with
the company three years ago. “Before
that, I’d been working in the downtown
area, and we’d gone to two different
day cares, but coming here to SMUD
and having the location so close to
where our office was, that was obvi-
ously going to be a no-brainer for me to
make the switch,” Sciandri says.
Both Sciandri and her husband
work, and she says “it was always a
part of the plan” to send their children
to day care. Knowing that SMUD of-
fered child care on-site for its working
parents was a highly sought-after
perk, and knowing her youngest is
nearby (her eldest has aged out of the
program and is enrolled in school)
eases some of the “working-mom
guilt” as well, she says.
“It’s a family-oriented feeling,
when you talk to other coworkers that
have kids there or have had kids there
in the past,” Sciandri says. “Knowing
that other people have done it, and
their kids have thrived in that setting
with their parents working, it gives
you a little peace of mind.”
2150 Stone Blvd.
West Sacramento, CA 95691
916.372.0600
ncbevw.com
More than 1 million millennial women
become new mothers every year, ac-
cording to the Pew Research Center, but
the increasingly obvious skew toward
older motherhood may stem from many
factors, including delaying marriage,
more women seeking higher education
and more women in the labor force.
But it could be better. According to
Rand Europe, an independent not-for-
profit policy-research organization,
women in Germany can take up to
three years of paid maternity leave,
and in 2013, its government guaran-
teed every child over 12 months old
a spot in public day care. As of 2016,
parents who cannot get their child
into one of these centers can sue the
government for lost wages. France has
had publicly funded day care since
1848, and a mother can take up to 16
weeks of paid maternity leave.