BridgeCare founder and CEO Jamee Herbert and son Wilder. (Contributed Photo)

BOULDER CREEK — In 2016, Jamee Herbert was engaged on ending her Master of Business Administration in sustainable programs as she additionally was getting married. As a outcome, beginning a household was on her thoughts continuously. It could be a number of years earlier than she had a toddler of her personal, however she was already noticing the issue in accessing high quality youngster care.

“I’m a planner,” she stated. “I started saving for a car in second grade, so I saw the writing on the wall of how challenging it is to access and afford high-quality child care and the impact that has on women’s careers and decided to really set out and create a solution for it.”

The answer was BridgeCare, a data-driven software program program geared toward connecting youngster care suppliers and making bills extra reasonably priced. Growing from a startup based within the “she shed” of Herbert’s Boulder Creek dwelling to an internationally acknowledged firm, BridgeCare has seen a speedy rise, sufficient to be named the 2023 Early Childhood Education Innovation of the Year by EdTech Breakthrough.

“(It’s) really exciting to have our work acknowledged by a leading award in the broader (educational technology) and also to have early childhood be acknowledged as an award by EdTech as well,” she stated. “Our innovation in our sector, which hasn’t always been included in the idea of ed tech broadly, shows the growth of acknowledgment of the importance of early childhood and the importance of innovative solutions to solve its problems.”

Herbert stated any father or mother who has completed analysis on youngster care is conscious of the difficulties confronted in accessing care, when it comes to affordability, high quality and knowledge. The greatest motive, she stated, is that youngster care is “one of the very last frontiers of modernization.” Some businesses even nonetheless depend on fax machines as the first technique of receiving data outdoors of bodily dropping off paperwork.

“That creates inefficiencies in administering programs, but it also creates real obstacles for families to engage with those systems,” she stated. “By creating a more accessible platform, we’re able to create a better-functioning system.”

The purpose, Herbert stated, is to modernize the kid care ecosystem by connecting native governments, households and care suppliers onto one platform. The program has totally different modules to help totally different wants, corresponding to subsidy administration, youngster care supplier searches and grant administration. These modules are utilized by state and native governments and nonprofits to help suppliers of their respective jurisdictions.

“(It’s) about unifying those systems to create a better-funded and functioning system overall,” she stated.

More than 50,000 suppliers, 500 counties and 500,000 households are estimated to make use of BridgeCare. Herbert stated the corporate’s attain has tripled throughout the previous yr and actually began to develop initially of the COVID-19 pandemic when youngster care choices have been repeatedly being thought-about by dad and mom.

“The world kind of woke up to how important child care is,” she stated. “Our essential workers, suddenly overnight, couldn’t get to work because schools and child care centers were shut down, then quickly they were made available for essential workers only, but many, many millions of families struggled still with patching together care and work through the pandemic, and a lot of resources began to also support a prior underfunded sector of child care overall, so there’s been a lot of heightened understanding of the importance of investing in and modernizing our child care infrastructure.”

Herbert stated the response to BridgeCare has been overwhelmingly optimistic.

“It’s quite unique for a vendor, a software and technology vendor that works with government, to be such experts in the early care and education field and understand the nuances of their day to day,” she stated. “We’re a human-centered design solution, so the thing that we hear time and time again from our clients — which seems so small and obvious but is not actually that common — is that we really listen to them and their needs, and that’s reflected in the way we interact with them but also the product that we deliver for them.”

Herbert stated working within the Santa Cruz Mountains has its challenges, corresponding to having to evacuate through the CZU Lightning Complex fires whereas she was pregnant or coping with the storms this previous winter.

“It’s never a dull moment trying to grow a company out here in the mountains,” she stated.

However, Herbert loves how peaceable the setting is.

“(I) love being out here,” she stated. “I love what it has done for my family in particular, and my child gets to grow up in the redwood forest, but also building a company that helps our future generations.”