Charles Best Mobilized Millions for Teachers and Students. Here's What He Learned

A prominent education nonprofit leader has announced he will step down from the organization he founded as a young public school teacher. Charles Best, founder and CEO of DonorsChoose, the popular crowdfunding site that raises money for requests for classroom materials submitted by public school teachers, has announced he will leave the organization next year. DonorsChoose will commence a search for a new chief executive.

Best recently celebrated his 20th anniversary leading the organization and felt the time was right to pass the baton, wary of falling prey to founder’s syndrome.

“I don’t want DonorsChoose to be yet another nonprofit whose founder doesn’t move on or needs to be encouraged to find their next thing. I am still as engaged as ever, having as much fun as ever, but I do want to try my hand at one more thing before I retire and figure I better get at it.”

Best leaves behind an impressive legacy in the world of both education and fundraising, channeling funding for millions of educators’ projects and paving the way for the crowdfunding boom.

Humble origins

When Best created DonorsChoose in 2000, he was a 23-year-old high school history teacher at Wings Academy in the Bronx, and his previous work experience consisted of waiting tables over several summers.

Twenty-one years later, under Best’s leadership, DonorsChoose has raised over $1 billion for classrooms across the nation, with over 4.7 million supporters funding nearly 2 million projects submitted by teachers, including a landmark $29 million gift in cryptocurrency to pay for all 35,000 projects live on the site at the time. It was a pioneer in the field, created before the word crowdfunding even existed. DonorsChoose is arguably the world’s first online crowdfunding platform and was launched before Kickstarter, GlobalGiving, Indiegogo and Kiva.

The overwhelming success of DonorsChoose belies its scrappy beginnings.

Best wanted his students to read “Little House on the Prairie,” but his school lacked the funds to buy copies of the book. Like many of his colleagues, Best spent his own money on school supplies. At five every morning, he stopped by a Staples in Union Square in Manhattan to photocopy a section of the book to give to each of his students. As he made those photocopies, he thought of all the resources he and his fellow teachers wished they could provide for their students. It was there that the idea for DonorsChoose was born—a website where teachers could post requests for classroom supplies and donors could pick what projects they wanted to support.

Equipped with only a vision, plus pencil and paper, Best sketched his idea for the website. He then found a programmer who had recently immigrated from Poland and agreed to create the website for $2,000 based on his drawings. The layout was so primitive that visitors had to scroll down for minutes to find a specific teacher or project.

Best’s first “employees” were his students. They volunteered every day after school for about three months to reach potential donors by sending 2,000 letters addressed to people from Best’s college and high school alumni directories. His colleagues posted the first 11 teacher requests.

“We operated out of my classroom for our first four years with my students volunteering after school as the primary workforce. Our model was the same as it is today, wherein a teacher would submit a project request, and we would carefully vet and fact check that request before it was posted. When a project was funded, we would not give the teacher cash. We would purchase the materials and have them delivered to the classroom. The teacher would photograph the project in action, students would write thank you notes so the donor could then see the impact that they had.”

DonorsChoose, Best says, has stayed true to its model despite years of skepticism. The organization has not only thrived, but proven itself prescient in navigating the shifting winds of online marketplaces.

“eBay was ascendant and Amazon was considered to have an almost retrograde operating model in that they wanted to sit in between the buyer and the seller. So when people heard we were pitching philanthropists for the first time on supporting DonorsChoose, they would see our operating model and think that it was terribly labor-intensive, and that we would never be scalable. We ought to be an open marketplace that would pass through cash, and kind of trust that things would happen as promised. It took about 10 years before we proved that our more labor-intensive, integrity assurance approach to crowdfunding was a smart way to go.”

A force for equity

Integrity assurance is vital to DonorsChoose because of Best’s fear that crowdfunding does not alleviate inequity, but exacerbates it. The organization goes to great lengths to ensure each request comes from a low-income school. Projects must be true learning opportunities rather than wish lists of items, so DonorsChoose staff ask teachers follow-up questions about their requests when necessary.

“A teacher does not have to have friends with money or have students’ parents with money to be successful on DonorsChoose. If they create a project that’s compelling, they’ll be discovered by donors all across the country—that’s what’s made DonorsChoose a magnet for teachers in low-income communities. It’s what made DonorsChoose a force for equity. The many crowdfunding sites essentially reflect whether a fundraiser has friends with disposable income.”

Only a quarter of the dollars given to classroom projects are due to teachers who share their projects on Facebook and ask their friends and family for support. Three-quarters of money given through DonorsChoose comes from donors who have never met the teacher they are supporting.

“DonorsChoose is still quite different from 99% of the other crowdfunding sites that have launched in the years since. We’re different in that we’re not simply a fundraising tool for people to hit up the folks they know. We are not a fundraising commodity, but instead a community of people who want to support public school classrooms where the economic need is greatest, and who want to discover awesome projects that teachers they’ve never met have created.”

Overall, 60% of the money DonorsChoose raises comes from individuals, 80% of whom are women. Institutional donors—companies and private foundations—make up the remaining 40%. Best says donors’ socioeconomic backgrounds run the gamut: Roughly half are from households making more than $100,000 annually, and the other half making less than that.

Fundraising remains an evergreen challenge regardless of the organization’s track record of success, says Best.

“Twenty-one years into it, we are assiduously hand-cranking the pump to bring more donors onto our site to meet the needs of teachers during COVID, and teachers more generally, in low-income communities.”

Hard lessons from the pandemic

Because of the pandemic, the needs of teachers have never been greater, says Best. A recent survey from DonorsChoose reported that a quarter of teachers at low-income schools have 10 or more students who lack reliable internet access. Furthermore, the site has seen a large uptick in teachers requesting what Best calls “life essential resources,” meaning clothing, hygiene products or snacks for their students.

“Teachers’ jobs absolutely have gotten harder. We’ve been hearing more and more, at least anecdotally, about teachers deciding during the pandemic that it might be the year to retire because learning how to reach students remotely is such a higher-order challenge,” Best says. “The last year has been a weight to carry, I think heavier than any other.”

In the long term, Best hopes DonorsChoose can eventually stop funding requests for basic school supplies. Approximately half of teacher requests are for resources schools should provide, he says. The other half comprises more enriching projects such as field trips to science centers or therapeutic horseback riding for disabled students, which schools should not be expected to pay for. It is these projects Best would prefer DonorsChoose to fund.

But he’s also a realist as to the state of public education funding in America.

“There are students who, because of their racial identity or their socioeconomic background, have less access to the books, art supplies, field trips, robotics kits that are vital to a great education. Both education philanthropy and the system itself have not stepped up in the way they should.”

To that end, DonorsChoose wants to help philanthropists become more conscious about equity in their giving. Two years ago, it launched #ISeeMe, a program to support underrepresented educators who request materials to bolster their students’ identity development. Additionally, DonorsChoose invited teachers who use the site to share their racial identity, their gender identity, their alma mater, and whether they are a first-generation college graduate. Over 200,000 public school teachers have shared their demographic information with the organization.

“It gives philanthropists working through DonorsChoose an ability that did not exist before—to listen to and learn from teachers of color at an unprecedented scale,” Best says. “That’s an example of the work that we’ve been doing to help education philanthropists be more equity-forward.”

There is evidence that DonorsChoose helps decrease inequity in public schools through its grassroots approach. A paper from three researchers at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, using Pennsylvania school data, found that funding DonorsChoose projects led to gains in student performance. If there is one thing Best is most proud of during his 21-year tenure, it is that DonorsChoose harnesses the wisdom of classroom teachers to know what will help students achieve.

“A thousand textbooks sent down from the central office are not necessarily going to cause a gain in student learning. However, books, supplies, a field trip, or a robotics kit selected by a classroom teacher based on their individual students’ needs and personalities, are going to be so well-targeted and thoughtfully selected, they are capable of causing a gain in student learning.”

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