Every foundation has an origin. Ours is a four-year-old girl, a nightly routine, and a prayer she repeated for months before her father truly heard it.
Our founder had left a job at Apple to pursue a dream: teaching. He earned a master's degree in education and gave his days to other people's children — while raising his own family in a subsidized apartment, relying on food programs to keep the refrigerator full.
Every night ended the same way: lying down with his four-year-old daughter, finishing the day with a bedtime prayer. Usually he prayed first. One night, though she wasn't an assertive little girl, she asked to go first — as if something in her had been waiting.
That night it finally landed. A teacher can see their entire financial future on one page — the salary schedule. This year, next year, ten years from now. And on that schedule, there was no version of the future where he could answer his daughter's prayer.
Something had to be done. He got into real estate and started helping teachers buy homes — and found that every closing felt like purpose. Out of that work came the Teachers Deserve More Foundation.
Because the teacher shortage is, at its core, a compensation and dignity problem. From 1970 to 2010, about 12% of college students studied education. Today it's 4% — a 66% collapse in the pipeline, arriving exactly as a generation of teachers retires.
Salaries are set by schedules that are hard to move. But homeownership as a benefit changes the math of choosing to teach — and gives communities a concrete way to invest in the people educating their kids.
To reverse the teacher shortage in America by making homeownership achievable for teachers — through direct home-buying grants today, and dedicated teacher housing developments with school districts tomorrow.
Every gift helps a teacher put down roots — and every home purchased through our agent network replenishes the fund for the next teacher.
