Crowd-sourced chalkboards.

Charles Best, CEO, was a high school history teacher in the Bronx. “As a teacher, I was always spending my own money on school supplies, as does nearly every teacher in America.”

DonorsChoose.org makes it easy to help classrooms in need. Public school teachers post classroom project requests, which range from pencils for poetry to microscopes for mitochondria.

No bake sale necessary.

“We didn’t just need money for supplies, we needed a fundraising platform. Our three tenets were: 1. Choice, 2. Transparency, 3. Feedback.”

Digitized donations expand the donor pool.

Best began the website as an experiment, encouraging fellow colleagues to post their own projects they wanted to get funding for. “I had to fund them myself because I didn’t know any donors to fund those projects, but I did so anonymously which made my colleagues think the website actually worked.” Things quickly caught on and the rest is digital donation history.

Get involved.

DonorsChoose.org connects teachers directly with donors nationwide. Donations as small as $1 are just a few clicks away. Create an account at DonorsChoose.org, and select a project you’d like to support.