Food for Thought

How a pear pie in Brooklyn changed classrooms across the country

Written by Christopher Caen

Very few web sites invite you to become annoyed. Even fewer cause you to become openly angry as you click from page to page. Yet, as one visits DonorsChoose.org, this is the first reaction that is triggered. Art classes without art supplies. School libraries without books. Science teachers without science equipment. The surprise is that these shortfalls are not from schools in a Third World Country. They are in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. One of the schools on the web site could be right down your street. This is the reality of public education in the richest country in the history of the world.

We are reading more and more about the shortcomings of education in the United States . The problem appears to be growing with each day and becoming so systemic and overwhelming that the ability of individuals to make a difference appears lost. What can one person accomplish where the govern ment of our country seems to be failing so spectacularly? What was needed is a defining mo ment to stem the tide. No one thought, however that the defining mo ment would be a baked pear dessert.

Charles Best does not look like a revolutionary. When you first meet him he is quiet and gracious. He listens more than he talks. Although very tall, he hunches slightly when talking to so meone, almost willing himself down to their height. The more he talks, though, the more you are aware of a deep determination. This is a man who does not get knocked off the tracks easily, and the history of Charles and DonorsChoose.org bears this out.

Nothing in Charles' background indicated his future. Growing up in a comfortable life with his family in New York, he went to high school at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, a prep school known so well for its Gothic English architecture that one magazine referred to it as "America's Hogwarts." A perennial feeder into Harvard, Yale and Princeton, it was not a terrible surprise that Charles wound up at Yale. Up to this moment, nothing seemed out of the ordinary and a future as a successful lawyer or Wall Street broker seemed secure.

Until Charles wound up teaching at a inner-city school in the South Bronx, that is. As he approached graduation Charles had decided that he wanted to be either a teacher or a police officer. He picked the for mer , and beca me a social studies teacher at the Wings Academy in the Bronx , a high school located in a for mer factory building. It was as far a cry from the bucolic and refined setting of St. Paul 's as you could get.

One day, Charles and his fellow teachers were in the teacher's lounge, talking about their wish lists, about the things they wanted for their school and their students. As he listened to their dreams, a germ of an idea began growing in Charles' head.

This was around the same time that articles were being written about where and how charitable donations from September 11th were being spent. Some of the money was going to the survivors, but some was also going for salaries and overhead. The problem for many donors was that they had no clear idea how their money was going.

The germ of an idea was this. What if you could create a mec hanism where donors could choose themselves where their money was spent? There would be no question of how the charity was spending the money because there would be no charity, just individuals contributing on a one-to-one basis. It was a radical notion, and not one that was met with universal glee.

Which brings us to his mom's baked pear dessert. One day Charles gathered his fellow teachers at his mother's house. As they sat down to eat the dessert, he told them his plan. It was to build a website where teachers could post their needs online, and donors could fund them directly. What Charles was proposing was an eBay for school funding. The only problem was he lacked teacher proposals to post on the site. The deal with his fellow teachers that day was the following: if you eat one of my mom's pears, you have to post a proposal online. With her cara melized fruit dessert right in front of their noses, there was no way they could say no.

In 2000, DonorsChoose.org was launched. All the initial teachers' proposals were funded, but there was more to this story than met the eye. Only years later did the initial group of teachers discover that the ‘donors' who had funded their proposals were in fact the sam e person: Charles himself. He had used his own savings to get the ball rolling.

Quickly the site started growing. Even though all the proposals came from teachers in the New York area, money was flowing in from around the country. And the idea of a nonprofit vehicle that was not a nonprofit was still uncomfortable for people. "It's still a very small operation," sniffed a program officer for a large foundation to The New York Times. "What DonorsChoose does is take the middleman out of the equation, and that middleman is the charity who is my client," grumped a consultant to the Times.

The only people who mattered to Charles, though, were the teachers. And as DonorsChoose started to grow across the country, so did the thanks of the students and teachers. Wrote one teacher from California to a DonorsChoose contributor, "Dear Mysterious Angel. I don't know who you are, but you have given forgotten children a chance to experience the world. You are amazing."

Charles had tapped into one-to-one philanthropy like no one before. DonorsChoose was geared to support these relationships. When donors fund one of the proposals, they receive an email thanking them for their donation almost im me diately. The real impact hits them about a month later, when a package arrives in the mail from the class itself. There are handwritten notes from the children and photos of them using the supplies or equip me nt they bought. If the funding happened around the end of the year, they are almost guaranteed to get a holiday card from the entire class. No one has to wonder where their money went: the evidence of your charity is right before your eyes.

It was such an obvious idea as to be brilliant. Connect people who want to help teachers with the teachers that need the help.

DonorsChoose was a hit almost im me diately, much to the consternation of Charles. He had no offices. He had practically no staff. He had no money. He pooled all his funds and moved back into his parent's house. But equip me nt needed to be bought and a web site needed to be grown. DonorsChoose was going national before Charles was ready to handle it.

He began tapping contacts through his connections at St. Paul's and Yale. He started cold-calling magazines, newspapers, television stations and anyone else he could think of. Slowly, the story of DonorsChoose started getting out. AOL Time Warner and Goldman Sachs helped with the funding. When they expanded to San Francisco, local venture capitalist Vinod Khosla from the powerful firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers chipped in the start-up costs.

Then in 2003 lightning struck. DonorsChoose was me ntioned on Oprah Winfrey's television show. The results were im me diate. And overwhelming - to the point where the servers crashed from the crush of traffic. But the story was out, and in typical DonorsChoose fashion, more funding appeared just because.

In Los, Angeles, Judy Chambers Beck read about DonorsChoose in a BusinessWeek article. It im me diately struck a chord because her husband's for me r wife was a teacher, and Judy's mother was a teacher for 30 years, and Judy herself volunteers as an art teacher at a local grade school. She and her husband did so me research on DonorsChoose and decided they wanted to help. The next ti me they were in New York , they me t with Charles. Im me diately, they fell in love with him and his passion for the project.

Charles told them that they were in desperate need of new computers because of their national expansion and the runaway traffic on the web site. The Becks decided to put their own money in and pay for all the new equip ment. What was it that made them jump in with such gusto? It was that emotional connection that they were drawn to. They appreciated the real-tim e response of finding a teacher in need on the site and being able to do so mething about it right away. They looked forward to getting the handwritten notes from the students, every single one of which they have kept. Transparency was key.

"DonorsChoose appealed to me because of the immediacy of the response," Judy said. "This is the only place where I know immediately where the money went and how it benefited the recipients."

An unanticipated result of the DonorsChoose process is a form of "paying forward." Judy says that when she is with a friend who is having a bad day or is unhappy, she pulls out one of the notes from the children for her friend to read. She finds they can't stay down when they read how these children have been lifted up.

One of the teachers wrote in with a similar experience. "Through your kind donations, you have also sparked an outpouring of generosity in my students. When we received the rug, I explained to my students how we were able to receive the rug through DonorsChoose. I answered lots of questions about what DonorsChoose is and how the funding process works. I have seen an increase in random acts of kindness amongst my students and I have you and DonorsChoose to thank!"

If giving begets giving, and one kind deed deserves another, the greatest legacy of Charles Best's mom's pears in that kitchen goes way beyond the saving of classes and teachers. DonorsChoose is having a direct effect on how children see their world and their place in it. And this might be the greatest gift that DonorsChoose will ever fund.



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