Donors Choose: How Crowdfunding Changes Classrooms [VIDEO]


Big Idea: Donors Choose is an educational charity that allows donors to choose to fund a variety of classroom projects and materials.

Why It's Working: With more than $116 million raised and 6 million kids helped in classrooms all over the country, Donors Choose has been increasing its impact and surpassing funding records every year since it went live in 2003.

Bronx high school teacher Charles Best found that the resources for his classroom were severely lacking. He and his fellow teachers bought pencils and copy paper out-of-pocket, and spent much of their time together discussing the ways they wished they could engage their students if they had the extra funding.

"The resources our students needed and the projects that would bring the subject matter to life never went beyond the teachers' lunchroom," Best says.

Classroom funding has a trickle-down effect, which means that teachers have very little sway in procuring innovative or even necessary classroom materials. Even worse, school districts with lower-than-average funding suffer the most, where kids struggle with old textbooks and lack engaging materials to help foster learning. Best says that he knew there needed to be a grassroots approach to funding.

"I had an instinct that there were people out there who, if they had a way to donate with confidence and see where their money was going, then they would help teachers like us get our students those books, and enable us to take them on that field trip and do that science project," Best says.

So, Best created Donors Choose, an education charity that allows users to select a classroom project or materials list from a database and donate as little as one dollar. Once a project reaches its maximum funding, Donors Choose then purchases the materials for the classroom and sends it directly. As the classroom gets its resources, donors are thanked with letters, pictures and video showing the students engaging with their new materials. The website's mission caught like wildfire, attracting increased donors every year and garnering attention from celebrities, such as Stephen Colbert. Oprah Winfrey even invited Best on her show and gushed about the charity on-air.

"She really talked about our site as a place where any public school teacher can be an innovator and anybody — even if they only have one dollar to spare — can be a true philanthropist," Best says.

Nine years into the journey of Donors Choose, Best says he's now focusing on how to change the school system at large. The best way to do this, he explains, is to take a hard look at the charity's own data and open it up for public analysis.

"We think if we can take the individual good deeds taking place on our site, the data being generated by the immediate relief that people are providing to platforms through our site, we could change the system itself," Best says.

Watch our interview with Best above, and let us know if you've ever donated to Donors Choose in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, skynesher