Teachers all across the country are pushing their budgets to the limit in a time of growing class sizes and shrinking budgets. Often we as teachers are told that we need to do more with less, this simply a reality of the educational arena these days. A number of teachers have taken this as a slam and become dejected by a mentality others have taken it as a call to arms and stepped to create new and innovative lessons and units to help their students perform better in and out of the classroom. Unfortunately many of these projects do not get to be used in the classroom and if they do, it is often only once or twice due to lack of funds in the program or school. In times like this, teachers often turn to educational foundations for funds and while these entities do their best to keep up with requests for project items, many people simply do not know about them.

One group has taken the idea of the educational foundation to a different place, the Internet at DonorChoose.org teachers can submit a project proposal, which is reviewed and vetted by the DonorChoose staff for authenticity and need. The project proposals are then posted on their website where people can choose which projects to donate towards. Donations range from $5 to any amount the donor chooses, while many projects are funded by many donors, some donors feel generous to fully fund a single project. Projects are given time-periods in which donations are collected and at the end of the donation period, if the requested donation amount is achieved DonorChoose purchases the requested materials and ships them directly to the school. Once the classroom has received their materials and they have implemented the project, they send follow up information back to DonorChoose and the project sponsors in the form of photos and hand-written letters. The projects donors also receive a project expense report to see how the money that they have donated has been spent. This method of transparency and feedback has helped to build a strong community that helps to fund many projects that would otherwise go without funding to many schools across the country.