Short version: Help me fund a project to help teach 6th graders math by providing physical “manipulative” aids for a classroom at my old middle school: Making Math Make Sense in Mrs. B’s Classroom.

If you watch the Colbert Report (or listen to NPR as much as I do), you’ve probably heard about DonorsChoose.org. The problem: teachers lack resources for innovative projects within public school budget constraints. People in the school community (defined broadly) want to support these pro-active teachers. Schools resort to a multitude of fundraising gimmicks to fill these gaps, often turning kids and their parents into a free-labor sales force for overpriced products (how many pounds of Morley Candy have my fellow CVHS alumni sold?). People buy these products “for a good cause.” If a company made a bit of a profit off the deal, at least the school got a cut.

In the past, these fundraisers were a necessary evil to compensate for limited school budgets dictated by a political process external to the classroom itself. Asking every possible donor for money for every possible project would have been an impossibly expensive task. The potential donor pool for any specific project is unique (some people want to give in their community; others for teaching math; others for kids with learning disabilities; etc). Instead of incurring the (unreasonable) expense of trying to identify potential donors, inform these donors of the potential project, and importantly, informing interested donors in a timely fashion that there are other interested donors that are also willing to shoulder part of the cost — people instead would fork over some cash in exchange for some chocolate and trust that the school system would manage it well enough; and if not, at least they got some chocolate.

The insight DonorsChoose had is the lesson Clay Shirky outlines in his recent book Here Comes Everybody — the Internet has changed everything. The previously expensive task of publishing a list of potential projects in a timely fashion for discovery by possible donors has become essentially free. Recognizing this, DonorsChoose provided a platform to give teachers the power to reach around the politics and bureaucracy of the school system and give donors the power to see exactly how their dollars will be used.

This evening I saw DonorsChoose CTO Oliver Hurst-Hiller present at the NY Tech Meetup. When I met Oliver after his presentation, he gave me a $30 gift certificate. The first thing I did when I got home was to figure out how to give it away. I quickly found my K-12 school district found one project seeking funding at my old Middle School. I saw that it had already reached 10% of its fundraising goal. I decided to give to this project and double-match the gift certificate, bringing it to 26%. Now it’s up to you to help us finish raising the last few dollars.

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