001: Sustainable Financial Practices in Early Childhood Education with Louise Stoney

Childhoods By Wonderschool

One of the most important factors of financial stability and growth in a community is ensuring access to affordable child care. However, simply funneling money into the child care system has not led to greater accessibility and, in fact, has forced many small-scale mom-and-pop centers out of the market, leaving caregivers with fewer options and higher costs.

Instead, Louise Stoney, a pioneering child care advocate, suggests that a more sustainable answer lies in how individual child care practices are managed.

For today’s episode, I sat down with Louise to discuss the importance of sustainable financial practices in early childhood education. Louise has spent her career working with local governments, private foundations and policy organizations in over 40 states to ensure a robust and enduring child care system. Louise understands the importance of making child care accessible in order to promote equality for women, especially in underserved communities. Through her problem solving, she has created the Iron Triangle model to promote financial health in child care practices of all sizes and scales.

Louise’s approach to problem solving stems from a diverse childhood during the Civil Rights era, moving from integrated New York to segregated Florida in the early 1960s, and her progressive parents that taught her the best way to find a solution is to stay focused on the question at hand. In our discussion, Louise explains how this background has informed her approach to keeping child care businesses both affordable and sustainable and how this path brought her from a specialty in social work to becoming a financial consultant for child care businesses all around the country.

In this episode you’ll hear:

• The three key business metrics that make up the Iron Triangle approach to sustainable child care
• How Louise’s background in the Civil Rights era and feminism studies have influenced her current child care approach
• Why creating child care business models that follow similar financial principles to small businesses or farm co-ops can be a helpful shift
• The importance of managing scale to ensure sustained success of a child care business

Resources from this episode: Louise Stoney’s website: www.stoneyassociates.com

*** EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com.