New Blog 1: Donorschoose

Friday 12 October 2012

Donorschoose

DonorsChoose.org (run from www.donorschoose.org) is a United States based nonprofit organization that provides a way for people to donate directly to specific projects at public schools (sometimes known as peer-to-peer philanthropy). DonorsChoose.org was started in 2000[2] by Charles Best, a teacher at a public high school in the Bronx. Since then, it has grown to serve all the public schools throughout the United States. As of August 2011, more than $86 million dollars had been donated to over 210,000 projects, helping more than 5,150,000 students in need. By August 2012, that has increased to more than $121 million dollars donated to fund over 291,000 projects to help 6,900,000 students. Real-time impact statistics are available. The organization collects proposals from teachers and makes them available to public schools through its website. Individual donors can select projects and contribute as much as they are prepared to. DonorsChoose.org then purchases necessary supplies and ships them directly to the schools, and generates a line-item budget which is sent to the donor. All donors receive photographs of the project and a letter from the teacher, and donors who contribute $50 or more to a project also receive a "thank-you package" of hand-written thank-you notes from students.