Center for Social Innovation

Published: June 16, 2011 Download  15 minutes, 7.2mb, recorded 2011-05-23

DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need. Public school teachers post classroom project requests on the site and donors browse project requests and give any amount to the one that inspires them most. In this audio interview with Stanford Center for Social Innovation correspondent Ashkon Jafari, founder Charles Best talks about how he started the organization and what some of its challenges have been along the way. He also discusses the organization’s use of cross-sector collaborations, initiatives it is currently working on, and the impact it is having on America’s young people.

Charles Best, CEO of DonorsChoose.org, founded the organization at Wings Academy, a public high school in the Bronx where he was a social studies teacher for five years. He thought up DonorsChoose.org during a lunch conversation with colleagues, and his students volunteered to help start the organization. To entice his fellow teachers to try out the new website, Charles offered them his mother's famous pear dessert. DonorsChoose.org has been growing ever since.

Resources

• DonorsChoose.org
• Charles Best's blog
• Catalytic Philanthropy, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article
• Philanthropy, Inc., a Stanford Social Innovation Review article