The Green Bottle Financial Privilege Model

At BADT, we value financial accessibility, so for each live 12-week training, we offer not only several payment plans, but also partial and full scholarships to help support our community.

We do our best to provide some financial support to everyone who completes a scholarship application (as long as they have not already enrolled in the course).

To do so, we prioritize scholarship applicants who have not received a scholarship from us in the past, express greater financial need (self-described), and have historically marginalized identities.

How Do We Help You Determine Financial Need?

To help you determine financial need, we use the Green Bottle Financial Privilege Model created by Alexis J. Cunningfolk in 2015.

This model offers a visual aid to help you determine where you fall on the sliding scale of financial privilege. The full bottle on the left represents those who have more financial freedom and more expendable income. The bottle in the center represents those who have some economic access, but who may stress around meeting their basic needs. The bottle on the right represents those who may regularly struggle to get their basic needs met due to a lack of financial access.

We like this model because sometimes it can be difficult to concretely identify where we fall along this continuum, and the lists within each bottle can give us a better sense of our personal financial experience within a greater context.

Birth Work and Financial Sustainability

Birth work is vital, life-saving, and incredibly valuable.

Unfortunately, our culture, particularly in the U.S., does not necessarily value care work either socially or financially.

Over time, those in power created laws and systems that made birth work, once led by Black birth workers and midwives, illegal and inaccessible, creating a cycle in which birth work is undervalued and underpaid, but standards and requirements are higher, particularly with the rise of Medicaid certification requirements.

We understand that, as a result, our community often faces financial hardship.

While Medicaid can be a useful tool to help us serve members of our community who may not typically be able to access doulas, it can be difficult to access the education that may be required to offer that care.

Regardless of certification status or whether someone is working with Medicaid, birth workers deserve equitable access to continuing education. This helps us provide quality care while also offering additional avenues for creating more sustainable streams of income.

Sliding Scale Models

Offering a sliding scale requires that we center trust, accountability, and honesty.

It requires reciprocity.

Tools like the Green Bottle Model help us practice accountability with ourselves and each other. We will always do our best to value the teachers we work with and ensure their work is sustainable while keeping our trainings at a fair price point for our students.

And we trust that our students will be honest with themselves about their needs, whether they are needing more or less support.

We want to validate that that can be difficult, especially when needs shift abruptly, or perhaps there is a financial win to celebrate. Such shifts can be jarring, exciting, or challenging, and financial conversations can be activating whether there has been a recent change or not.

Regardless, we hope that the concrete nature of this tool helps ground our community in committing to the financial sustainability of both themselves and each other.

Interested in a Scholarship?

If you’re interested in applying for a scholarship for one of our live 12-week courses, the best way to stay up-to-date for application announcements is to sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Instagram.

While the scholarship amount requested cannot be guaranteed, we strive to meet our community’s needs as best as we can. We hope that you’ll join us for an upcoming training and can’t wait for you to be part of our community!