For Many Educators, Crowdfunding for Basic Resources is a “Way of Life”
We all know about the lengths educators go to make sure their classrooms are stocked with school supplies for their students. They will not hesitate to spend their own money – to the tune of at least $459 every year and not likely to be reimbursed – to purchase everything from pencils, extra notebooks, rulers, even software programs.
But these efforts don’t stop there. Paying for school supplies or classroom projects can be too expensive to pay for out-of-pocket. Which is why more educators over the past decade turned to crowdfunding, namely DonorsChoose, which connects potential donors to classrooms in need. After teachers post funding requests on DonorsChoose, individual donors review the site’s thousands of proposals and select a project to fund.
From 2009 to 2019, teachers submitted 1.8 million requests to DonorsChose. What kind of projects are educators proposing? What kind of schools do they teach in? And what sort of projects are being approved? What, if anything, do these requests tell us about what resources our classrooms lack?
Grantmakers for Education (GFE), a large network of education grantmakers, recently analyzed the DonorsChoose database of requests to answer these and CONTINUE READING: For Many Educators, Crowdfunding for Basic Resources is a "Way of Life"