Standing out from the crowd with employee benefits designed for the nonprofit sector

Stress and burnout are at an all-time high among healthcare workers. In order to combat this issue effectively, the leadership team at Fred Finch Youth & Family Services, a nonprofit organization that provides mental health resources across California, knew that they needed to take their employees’ perspectives to heart.

“We held listening sessions where employees were invited to discuss ways we could better support staff,” says Lois Woods, the organization’s Senior Director of Human Resources.

“When student debt kept coming up in those conversations, we dug a little deeper, and found that many employees’ student loan balances were over $40,000. Combined with the emotional toll our work can take and the fact that we’re in an area with a high cost of living, that’s an extremely heavy burden,” she says. “We want our employees to feel good about coming to work, and financial stress makes that hard — but by offering student debt benefits, we can help alleviate that stress.”

In addition to the core platform and repayment contributions, Fred Finch also offers Candidly’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness solution, which Lois says has greatly reduced the administrative investment required to manage the program — and made the program more attractive to employees.

“Before implementing Candidly, we were manually processing PSLF applications, which took a lot of time and effort from our HR team. Candidly eliminates that work, while also making it easier for employees to participate. And since employees are managing PSLF within the platform, they can engage with the other tools and services Candidly offers — and that engagement is great for our outcomes, too,” she says.

Dr. Nydia Mershani has always been passionate about working in underserved communities. “That’s my calling, and what initially drew me to the nonprofit sector,” she says. “But PSLF has definitely incentivized me to stay in the sector. I can do the kind of work that I really love, while knowing that I won’t have student debt forever, even though I don’t earn as much as I could if I worked in a private practice.”

But Nydia’s first experiences with the program were lackluster, to say the least. “I first learned about PSLF around the time that I finished graduate school, but because the guidelines were so confusing, I wasn’t proactive about it, and I didn’t apply until years later,” she says. “When I did, navigating the process on my own was difficult and tedious. I remember having to call around to figure out how to fill out the form and where I needed to fax it.”

Now that Nydia’s employer, Fred Finch Youth & Family Services, provides Candidly’s PSLF solution as part of its student loan benefit offering, her days of phone calls and faxes are long behind her.

“With Candidly, the process is so easy — all I have to do is click a few buttons. It’s really nice to be able to be certain that my form has been completed and submitted to the right person, and to be able to check on my form’s status and my payment progress at any time.”

“Candidly gives me a clear picture of the reality of my student loans,” Nydia says. “Having all of that information in one place helps me make better decisions about not just my student debt, but also my day-to-day finances as a whole.”