Philanthropy411 is currently covering the Fall Conference for Community Foundations with the help of a blog team. This is a guest post by Katie Bisbee, Senior Vice President of Marketing at DonorsChoose.org. Follow her organization on Twitter – @DonorsChoose.
By: Katie Bisbee
Along with their conference name badges, all Council on Foundation conference attendees received $100 philanthropic gift cards to spend at DonorsChoose.org on classrooms in need from their local areas.
By way of background, DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need. Here’s how it works: public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.org. Requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit, to violins for a school recital, to microscope slides for a biology class.
Then, people can browse project request and give any amount to the one that inspires them. Once it reaches its funding goal, DonorsChoose.org delivers the materials to the school. Then the donors get photos of the project taking place, a thank-you note from the teacher, and a cost report showing how each dollar was spent.
So back to the conference… The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which cares deeply about informed and engaged communities, generously paid for every Council on Foundations conference attendee to receive a $100 gift card, so that they could read through classroom requests on DonorsChoose.org in their communities, and then pick a classroom project to support.
On the first day of the conference yesterday, attendees already supported almost 100 classrooms across the country, such as “Earthquakes and Volcanoes In My Classroom!” in Livonia, Michigan, “Do the Reading Shuffle!” in Sacramento, CA, and “Fear Factor
” in Warsaw, Ohio.
Attending the conference in person? Visit the DonorsChoose.org booth in Community Central to pick the classroom you’d like to support!
