451: Meredith Olson—Better Education Now

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 39.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Meredith Olson is president of Vela, a nonprofit that funds everyday entrepreneurs who are ditching the traditional school model in favor of something a little more… flexible. Vela doesn't run schools—it supports people creating their own. From homeschool co-ops to microschools in living rooms and libraries, Vela empowers parents, students, and entrepreneurs to reimagine education outside of traditional systems. With more than 4,200 schools being supported, Vela is quietly fueling one of the most important grassroots education revolutions of our time.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike Rowe here. It's the way I heard it with an episode called Better Education Now.
0:09.0	Now, Mike.
0:09.7	Now. Now. Come on. Bring it on.
0:12.7	How long do we have to wait for better education?
0:15.2	I don't know, but it's already passed now and we don't have it.
0:17.9	But we're going to. Yes.
0:19.5	Hey, my guest is Meredith Olson, a really interesting
0:22.9	woman who I met years ago at Stand Together. And Stand Together, of course, is a, I guess, let's call it
0:31.3	a celebration of bottom up solutions. They've been sponsoring people you should know. Yes.
0:36.8	Over on my YouTube page.
0:39.0	Anyway, Meredith sort of morphed through that organization and wound up running an education, I guess, let's call them an educational entity.
0:50.1	Sure.
0:50.5	Yeah.
0:51.0	Vela, V-E-L-A, they're only about 10 people in this nonprofit, and they oversee 4200 schools that are
1:02.8	somewhere between private schools and public schools with the Dasha homeschooling thrown into it.
1:08.6	Yeah, yeah.
1:09.0	Right.
1:10.2	So, long story short, there's a video
1:12.4	on my Facebook page right now that's generating lots of questions from people who are super
1:18.5	interested in exploring these schools. You have to think of them like community schools. Some of them
1:26.1	are in buildings that look like it could be an elementary
1:30.3	school building, but very rarely. Most of them look like a dentist office. Yeah. Yeah. These are
	...

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