327: How Can Boost Help Teachers in Financial Crisis? Podcasthon 2026 Episode

In this heartwarming episode of Childcare Conversations, Kate and Carrie chat with Meredith Douglas from Boost, a nonprofit helping preschool teachers through tough times, think surprise car repairs or medical bills. Meredith shares how Boost steps in with emergency funds, offers financial education, and makes it easy for directors to nominate teachers in need. 

They also discuss how centers can support Boost through donations, creating a ripple effect that benefits entire classrooms. If you care about teachers and kids, this episode is packed with practical ways to make a real difference! 

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Transcript

Kate Woodward Young (00:05)
Why do you want to support your staff when they're having a really, really hard time?

Carrie (00:11)
Because I'm nice, duh. But here's the better question. Why should you be instead supporting a nonprofit that supports your staff? Because then you have somebody else who has the final word on whether they get that financial support or not.

Kate Woodward Young (00:13)
HA HA!

Carrie, you're stealing Meredith's

whole thunder. You just, we're all done now. Like that you just said that everything. Like we're all done. All right. Well, we have Meredith Douglas on today with Boost by Hinge Advisors. And we are excited about the purpose and the mission behind Boost. And we are so glad that Hinge stepped up and put this organization together. And Meredith, if you will tell us a little bit about

Carrie (00:34)
No, we're not!

We're not.

you

Kate Woodward Young (00:58)
why Boost came to be, how long y'all have been around, some success stories. And we will probably interrupt you just like we do each other. So maybe that's a warning in advance. I don't know.

Meredith Douglas (01:11)
Sounds good to me. So I'm Meredith Douglas. I'm the director of fundraising with Boost, which is a nonprofit founded by Hinge Advisors. We basically provide support to teachers in need, specifically private preschool teachers, if they have an emergency need. So their car breaks down, they don't have any transportation to get to work, they have

any housing needs like ⁓ overdue utility bills or even as much as an eviction notice that has come to them. They are coming to ⁓ their regional director, their business owner and saying, I need help. I can't pay this emergency medical bill off or this my utility bills or my mortgage or my rent. And then that regional director or ⁓ business owner is coming to boost and saying, hi,

Can you help my preschool teacher? And that's what we're here for. We're here to provide that emergency support to get them out of a crisis situation. We're really proud. We started in like 2024 is when we officially launched applications. And since then we have helped over 250 teachers, which has been really, really.

Kate Woodward Young (02:31)
Wow,

that is awesome. And I think what's really cool and you kind of skated over it or around it, which is supporting those teachers in need. And we all know, Carrie, right, that teachers who are stressed out, they're not going to be any good in the classroom, are they? What do we need to do? How can we support them?

Carrie (02:50)
mean, we give them resources, we give them ways that they can get through the rough times because I actually spent this morning in the hospital with an educator whose child got admitted to the hospital last night. And part of check in was she was told that the insurance was not active. And she was like, Excuse me, what?

my insurance is not active. Now I was not responsible for her insurance. it was not I did a bad thing. But ⁓ that's how she found out that her insurance wasn't active while her child was in the emergency room and then later got admitted. So that would be a prime candidate for somebody who might be needing some help from boost because

Kate Woodward Young (03:45)
So that is a real life example and I'm sure Meredith has some other real life examples. so, ⁓ but before we talk about another example, if a director or an owner has this issue, where do they go? What does the process look like? And then I think you've got some tips for owners, but let's start with what's the process and what do they do?

Meredith Douglas (03:45)
Absolutely.

So the great thing about our application process is that we try to answer applications within a week of receiving them. So we try to make this as easy as possible because these are emergency situations. we know that the teacher will go to, so we don't allow them to go to their center director. We need at least one ⁓ kind of relationship removal. They need to go at least two steps above

their role. So that's why I say either a regional director, multi-site manager, or the business owner if it's just a single site center. So that's who the teacher needs to go to to ask for the help and then that person will be their nominator and they will nominate them. So that's the person who fills out the application usually with the teacher in need. But as soon as we receive that application

It goes through a review process. We have a specific review team that looks at it and make sure that they fit all of the eligibility requirements. Is this a licensed preschool center? Is the school in good standing? Is the teacher in good standing? Have they been with the school for 90 plus days? So you can see all of these things on our website at boostbyhinge.org. But then once the review process is done and we're saying, yes, this is a good candidate,

we will send the money to the teacher immediately. So we try to answer these things as quickly as possible. One step in between getting the money and the application is we do require teachers to do a financial jumpstart course, which is a 45 minute, very quick and easy course, but it's just something to help them kind of prevent the next emergency. These are things that they can do to kind of become more financially stable ⁓ so that when the next emergency hits,

which hopefully doesn't for a while, they can kind of handle it themselves. But Boost, like you said, you try to give them resources, Boost also wants to be that resource. So we have a director of teacher success who helps all of the teachers who have gone through the application process, whether they were given support or unless, or they were ineligible and we were unable to.

we will still connect them with community resources. So local resources that they have, we've done a lot of research. So all of the main cities where people have submitted applications from, we have a list of resources for housing needs, food and security needs, anything that we can connect them to if we can't be that support for them in that time. So that's our biggest goal is to be a resource and a support, even if it's not a check at the end of the day.

but we still wanna be a resource to teachers going through any kind of financial instability.

Kate Woodward Young (07:00)
I love that. And I love the financial jumpstart class. mean, ⁓ it's been a little while since I was a director and I was actually one of Carrie's directors. so Carrie had four sites. And one of the things that was great that we did with, ⁓ for our staff, cause we had a pretty significant amount of staff that would do the whole, can I just get that payroll advance for just a, you know, just a couple of days, you know, my car, this, my, my, my child, that.

Meredith Douglas (07:04)
Yes.

Kate Woodward Young (07:29)
kind of thing.

Carrie (07:30)
Yeah, that center

served a very, I mean, it was 85 90 % subsidy. And we hired from that same community. So we had a lot of people who this job was a stepping stone ⁓ out of poverty. And so yeah, they had a lot more challenges than people at some of my other centers.

Kate Woodward Young (07:54)
And we absolutely loved, we loved what some of the banks were doing at the time. So we collaborated with some banks, with some credit unions about offering almost a very similar class. And then we started opening it up to our parents. so whenever ⁓ those topics come up, we always tell folks, look, we did this back ⁓ before, yeah, a few years.

Meredith Douglas (07:54)
Yeah, and it's really difficult.

and nice.

Carrie (08:15)
A while ago. Just say a while ago.

You don't

Meredith Douglas (08:18)
We don't need a specific number.

Carrie (08:18)
need to be putting years on stuff. Shush, shush, shush. A while ago.

Kate Woodward Young (08:21)
You mean I shouldn't say more than one decade ago?

Okay, a while ago.

And so we just felt that it was a great community builder. again, depending on that community, ⁓ there are, especially if you think about the owner, right? Especially if that owner's got that connection, that owner probably is part of the Chamber of Commerce. Hopefully they've got a relationship with a personal banker and a bank.

A lot of those banks have classes very similar to what you're talking about. And so why wait until folks are in the, excuse my French, the ⁓ shit situation, bleep, bleep, bleep, sorry. That's my version of childcare. I was a little late. ⁓ But we want to make sure that our staff get these skills ahead of time. And why not also share that with the parents? So I can.

Meredith Douglas (09:05)
you

Carrie (09:15)
I think making sure that boost is there for your staff and for your staff five years, six months, three days from now is the other part of it. And that is instead of putting money aside inside your business for when one of your staff has a, my goodness moment, you can instead give it to boost and then you get a tax write-off for that where if you just give them money to pay for.

and I'm going to use the real life example I talked about before we got on before we started recording. They needed $1,000 so that their cat could get some lab work done. If you were to decide that yes, that $1,000 was important. Sometimes we make those decisions with our emotions and not our logic. And by putting money into boost, whether it's $20 a month,

Meredith Douglas (09:49)
Yeah

Carrie (10:13)
And then when you have somebody who comes to you crying because their cat needs lab work and they don't have $1,000, you can go, I hope that Boost can help you with that. Here's the process. Let's go through that. And then you're not the person saying, no, no, no, your cat's lab work is not the same as this other parent whose kid is in the hospital.

Meredith Douglas (10:38)
Yes, absolutely.

Carrie (10:38)
And so we're going to spend that thousand

dollars on the person who's kids in the hospital. And they're like, but my cat is my baby. And I get that from an emotional standpoint. But you as the owner or you as the director telling someone that their cat needing a thousand dollars of lab work versus somebody else's child needing a thousand dollars lab work is not the same. That's horrible on your employee morale. And there's conflict between your staff.

It's the same thousand dollars that you set aside for an emergency. But this way, there's a little bit more distance and there's a tax benefit. So I like that.

Meredith Douglas (11:15)
Absolutely.

Kate Woodward Young (11:17)
All right,

so Meredith.

Meredith Douglas (11:17)
Let Boost be your third party decision maker for situations like that. That's what we're here for.

Kate Woodward Young (11:21)
about this like absolutely so Meredith

yeah so tell us a little bit more about how an owner might go about doing that ⁓ do you guys ever have and if not maybe here's my challenge right I'm gonna put this out to some of the big the big companies right ⁓ some match opportunities so maybe there's a time of the year where XYZ program with you know 300 locations is gonna match a dollar for dollar for some of the smaller programs

Hint, hint, nudge, nudge. So, but are there times, are there ways? How does an owner get started donating? How do they know where to even start? Like, what's the process? Run me through. I'm a director. I got a few sites. I see this as a huge benefit to maybe, like in Carrie's case, Carrie had four sites, but only one school really had staff that kind of fell in that bucket consistently.

⁓ you know, how would I, what do need to do?

Meredith Douglas (12:23)
There's a few ways people can get involved. So anyone who has submitted an application to Boost where a teacher has been approved and received money, feel free. We will welcome your donation for the same amount back into the organization. And like Kate and Kiri said, it's tax deductible. So you get to write that off at the end of the year. And it also helps us continue to give to the next teacher in need.

You can do that by breaking it down into monthly payments, which is a big push that we're doing right now. We would love to have more monthly donors. We only have about four or five right now. ⁓ Yes, we want people to give. It helps us because it's consistent ⁓ in money coming in to our organization that we can count on that we know is coming in every single month. So monthly donations are incredible for our organization.

Kate Woodward Young (13:04)
Okay.

Meredith Douglas (13:22)
or just doing a lump sum donation that just helps us keep going. We launched at Shift Conference this year our Boost It Forward Fund, which allowed people to pledge an amount that they were going to give in 2026. We are so grateful we got a hundred and...

Kate Woodward Young (13:41)
Wait, wait, I just want to tell

everybody, Child Care Conversations has a pledge. And so ⁓ we would love it for folks to ⁓ definitely this week. So if you have not gone over and checked out our link on Pod Squeeze, ⁓ Pod Squeeze is one of the ⁓ podcast platforms that Child Care Conversations uses. And they are ⁓ doing a lot of promotion this week. And so we would love to see more people.

Kind of jump on board. Sorry, Meredith. I didn't mean to hijack your thunder there.

Meredith Douglas (14:14)
No, I love the promotion,

keep it going. That's great. Anyone who wants to make a pledge for 2026 or give as part of your Boost It Forward Fund pledge that maybe you've already made or to support the Child Care Conversations pledge that they made, please do get involved. It was one thing to help kind of people say, hey, yeah, I do wanna give, this is what I wanna give next year and then be able to plan a way to either fundraise that.

on their own throughout the year or create some kind of functions that they know that they are going to be giving to Boost in 2026. So we've got 149,000 pledges. About 15,000 of those have been paid already. It's early in the year still. So we know that those will be coming in later this year, but it's just money that Boost can count on for the year as well. So that's one way to give. ⁓

There are multiple different ways to give to Boost, but we do encourage those who are submitting teachers in their own schools to give back into the Boost so that we can continue caring for teachers throughout the year.

Kate Woodward Young (15:27)
Absolutely. So I think one thing that ⁓ is really important for those of you who have any experience in nonprofits, participation. So whether it's an arts program in your community or even a political action campaign that's wrapped around early childhood, ⁓ this is one of those situations where one of the biggest things that Hinge does is Hinge picks up the staff cost. So, you know,

when you're donating to Boost, you are literally donating to the fund that goes to ⁓ the teachers. Yeah, there's not, there's not a, and you got a little bit here for overhead and a little bit here for this staff. ⁓ Having spent a really ridiculous amount of time in that world, ⁓ I can tell you that I just think that this is the one thing that if you aren't sure, ⁓

Meredith Douglas (16:01)
All of that money is going directly to a teacher in need. All of it.

Kate Woodward Young (16:23)
Do your research. mean, absolutely. If you are historically an end of the year donor for different nonprofits, do your research, but go look up Boost and go look at how much of their money actually goes to the end user. Because I think you'll be really surprised, especially if you compare it to your local ⁓ YMCA, your local church.

⁓ There's a lot of places where the money that's donated do not end up in animal programs, because I love animal programs, but a lot of times the overhead is huge. And so ⁓ we really hope that you will take that opportunity to actually do your research. I can tell Carrie's got a question, so I'm going to turn it over to Carrie.

Carrie (17:10)
Well,

I was actually just thinking about when I used to volunteer at the local animal shelter and one time geese were dropped off. And they had no support system for how to support geese. ⁓ A donkey and geese.

Kate Woodward Young (17:24)
Isn't it duck

goose? Like you said, got all their ducks, their ducks were in the wrong pond. They had the wrong animal. That wasn't even like the in a row.

Carrie (17:27)
Yep,

so that was, you know, that that's where my brain was going was like you talking about the things not being prepared at a nonprofit. And I was like, they said that they help all the animals. And somebody was like, here, have a donkey and some geese. ⁓ And I think that that is part of what we in early childhood, sometimes we prepare for stuff for what is the normal

Kate Woodward Young (17:46)
Thank

Carrie (17:57)
everyday things that are going to happen at your program. And occasionally, a donkey shows up, meaning something weird happens at your program, and you need an outside resource. And I think boost is an amazing outside resource for when somebody has an unexpected medical expense or housing expense, or something like that, you know, they are

person who keeps all their money under the mattress and somebody broke in and stole their mattress. And now they're like, what am I gonna do for groceries next week? Those kinds of situations are what Boost is there for.

Kate Woodward Young (18:36)
gonna look at somebody driving around with a mattress on top of their car and a whole new light. I just want you to know, I'm now gonna be going, somebody stole that mattress. ⁓ I don't know why. Carrie's got geese, I got mattresses on top of cars. So with that, Meredith, what would you like to tell folks who are listening? ⁓ Again, usually it's directors and owners all around the globe. So we don't have just folks in the US, we've got folks in other countries.

Carrie (18:40)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Kate Woodward Young (19:04)
What should they do? How do they do it? It's all yours.

Meredith Douglas (19:08)
Well, right now, Boost only serves US-based private preschools. But if you are from outside the country and you want to support us, you are more than welcome to make a donation. Anyone is welcome to make a donation, always. I think the first thing is go to boostbyhinge.org. Get to know a little bit more about the types of situations that we, situations that we'll cover for emergency grants to teachers.

learn more ways about how you can get involved with us. Our Boost It Forward Fund is live on the website, so you can make a pledge or make a donation. You can do a monthly donation, a quarterly donation, just one lump sum donation to us. You can also see all of the resources that we have available. So all of those local resources that I referenced, they're all on our website as well. So if you're from Cleveland, Ohio, or from Raleigh in North Carolina, we have a specific

document, a PDF that you can just click and kind of reference, this is a resource for our housing needs in my area or for food insecurity. So if you're if you have a teacher that's struggling, but maybe isn't quite eligible for boost grant, you can refer them to those resources or get them in touch with our director of teacher success. Whitney Carper, she's fantastic and she's always available to help. But yeah, that's boost is just we're here. We're wanting to grow more.

I think we, I said we've served 250 teachers since launching in 2024. So it's only been like a year and a half. So we're really excited about the impact that we've made already and looking forward to making even more of an impact this year in 2026.

Kate Woodward Young (20:52)
Well, I just want to do some really quick math because you know, we can't have a talk about hinge without doing some math. So if you're listening to this, I just want you to think about there are 250 teachers that hinges supported. And if each one of those teachers only supported 10 kids in a classroom, that means that there is now 2,500 kids who didn't lose their teacher because of stress and they had to leave.

who were able to have a well-grounded teacher who was able to come back and continue with that program. And hopefully that makes you think just a little bit more because I went with a pretty conservative classroom size on an average. And knowing that you now have helped 2,500 kids be able to not have their own version of stress because they've got a stressed out teacher, I think is just absolutely wonderful. And I think the fact that Hinge is continuing to have this impact

⁓ is just an example of such a visionary goal from Hinge Advisors. And we are so excited to be able to share this. Carrie, people have listened to us. What do they need to do now?

Carrie (22:00)
Well, they need to go into the doobly-doo and they need to get the link so that they can go over to Boost and make their pledge. And they should look for ways that they can support the teachers in their program and in other programs in town. If you are one of our thousands of people listening from overseas, if your community needs something like this, reach out to Boost and say, hey, can you help us figure out

Meredith Douglas (22:27)
Absolutely.

Carrie (22:29)
what are the basics of how I set something like this up in South Africa? Because we know we've got listeners in South Africa and we know that they have a similar issue in South Africa. Reach out to the folks at Boost and get sort of the template so that you can support the early childhood community in your town as well or your country as well. This doesn't have to be a one and done. It can be done other places as well. So definitely.

go out, take action, whether that's making sure you know what the criteria is, so that if you have a family at your program who needs the support, or make that donation. Again, $5 a month can definitely make a difference if enough of us do that $5 a month. And I hope that you will share this show with someone else who needs to know, and come back for another conversation in a few days.

Meredith Douglas (23:18)
Absolutely.