The Classroom Wish List That Quietly Moved $1.6 Billion
A Bronx history teacher wanted books his students couldn't afford. Twenty-five years later, the website he built has moved more than $1.6 billion into America's classrooms - one crayon, microscope and field trip at a time.
In the spring of 2000, Charles Best was a social studies teacher at a public high school in the Bronx, spending his lunch breaks the way a lot of teachers do - talking with colleagues about the books they wished they could assign, the field trips they couldn't fund, the science equipment that stayed on a catalog page instead of a lab bench. The obstacle was rarely imagination. It was money, and specifically the awkward gap between a teacher who knew exactly what a class needed and a stranger somewhere who might happily pay for it if only there were a way to connect the two.
Best's idea was almost stubbornly simple: put the request online. Let a teacher describe a real project - 30 paperback novels, a set of graphing calculators, a bus to the natural history museum - and let anyone in the country fund it, a dollar at a time. When enough people chipped in, the organization would buy the materials and ship them to the classroom, then send the donor photos and thank-you notes so they could see precisely what their money did. He built the first version, seeded it with projects from teachers at his own school, and called it DonorsChoose.
A quarter-century later, that lunchroom fix has grown into one of the most-used charitable platforms in the United States. Donors have given more than $1.6 billion through the site, funding upward of 2.9 million classroom projects and reaching roughly 86% of America's public schools. It is, in the plainest terms, a marketplace for classroom generosity - and its central bet, that specificity is what makes people give, has held up remarkably well.
The IdeaYou don't give to a cause. You give to a classroom.
Most charitable giving asks for trust. You hand over money to an organization and hope it lands somewhere useful. DonorsChoose inverted that. On the site, you scroll through actual requests written by actual teachers - filterable by subject, location, poverty level, or the exact item requested - and you fund the one that gets you. A donor in Seattle can pay for microscopes in rural Mississippi and, weeks later, open an email with photos of seventh graders using them.
That feedback loop is not a nice-to-have. It is the product. By closing the distance between a gift and its result, DonorsChoose turned donating into something closer to buying a present for someone specific - concrete, personal, and oddly satisfying to complete.
How It WorksFrom a wish list to a shipped box
For teachers, the mechanics are deliberately low-friction. Any full-time, front-line educator at an eligible U.S. public school, public charter, or Head Start program can create a project by picking the materials they need from vetted vendors and answering a few short questions about who the students are and what the project will do. Donors take it from there.
Because DonorsChoose handles procurement itself, the money never passes through a teacher's personal account, and donors never have to wonder whether their gift bought what it was supposed to. The average fully funded project runs about $551, and roughly four in five posted projects reach their goal. Corporate partners and foundations amplify the rest through match offers, where a donation can be doubled or, in some campaigns, multiplied many times over.
Over the years the platform has widened beyond one-off projects. Classroom Essentials lists let teachers order everyday basics quickly, so donors can fund a curated set of high-need supplies rather than a single big-ticket item. Match offers and funding opportunities let companies target their giving by subject, geography, or specific materials - Panda Express's Panda Cares program funds requests across more than 150 communities, and Mazda has run a $250,000 holiday classroom initiative through the site. School districts and employee-giving programs, meanwhile, use DonorsChoose as the pipe through which their dollars and matching gifts reach individual classrooms at scale. For a donor, the practical takeaway is that a gift can be as small as a dollar and as targeted as one child's science kit; for a company, it is a way to turn a marketing budget into microscopes with a paper trail attached.
The Numbers Behind ItWhy teachers keep asking
The demand side of this marketplace is not a mystery. Teachers routinely spend their own money on classroom basics, and DonorsChoose's own research puts hard figures on the gap. In a spring 2025 survey of more than 2,500 educators who use the platform, teachers reported spending an average of $655 of their own money on their classrooms - and said that without DonorsChoose, that number would top $1,400. Nearly half reported working a second job, from tutoring to bartending, to make ends meet.
Those figures explain the platform's extraordinary reach. This is not a charity that had to sell itself into schools district by district. It handed teachers a way to ask their own communities for help and let word of mouth do the distribution. The result is penetration most organizations never touch: at least one teacher has posted a project at the large majority of public schools in the country.
The Business ModelThe optional 15% that funds a giant
DonorsChoose is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its funding model is as transparent as its projects. Teachers are never charged. At checkout, donors are invited to add an optional contribution - around 15% - to cover the organization's operating costs. About 84% of donors choose to pay it. The remainder of the budget comes from foundations, corporate partners, and major donors.
The approach has earned it durable credibility. DonorsChoose has held Charity Navigator's highest rating every year since 2005 - a streak few organizations of any size can claim. Annual revenue in recent years has hovered around $150 to $156 million, a figure that reflects the enormous volume of giving flowing through the platform rather than a traditional balance sheet.
The CompetitionHow it stands apart
Teachers have other ways to raise money - open crowdfunding on GoFundMe, wish lists on Amazon, rivals such as AdoptAClassroom.org and ClassWallet, and the ever-present school PTA. What separates DonorsChoose is fulfillment and reporting. Open crowdfunding hands a teacher cash and trusts them to spend it; DonorsChoose buys and ships the materials itself, then documents where every dollar went. That closed loop is harder to run, but it is exactly what makes donors comfortable giving again and again.
The People & The ReachFrom Oprah to Colbert to your inbox
DonorsChoose has never lacked for famous friends. A 2003 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show reportedly generated about $250,000 in donations in a single day. Comedian Stephen Colbert has served on its board and repeatedly steered attention - and money - toward classroom projects. Fast Company named it to its Most Innovative Companies list in 2011 and again in 2019, among the first nonprofits to earn the distinction.
But the real engine was never celebrity. It was scale built from the bottom up: hundreds of thousands of teachers, each quietly asking their own network for help, and more than five million donors answering. In 2022, founder Charles Best handed the chief executive role to Alix Guerrier, a former teacher and education-technology leader who previously ran the philanthropy platform GlobalGiving. Under Guerrier, the organization has leaned further into research on teacher spending and on the racial and socioeconomic gaps in how classrooms get funded.
Where It FitsThe quiet infrastructure of the wish list
Step back, and DonorsChoose occupies an unusual spot in the market. It is part crowdfunding platform, part logistics operation, part research shop on the state of American teaching - and it sits directly on top of a structural gap that no school budget fully covers. When a hurricane hits the Gulf Coast or a tornado flattens a town, it becomes a rapid-response tool; DonorsChoose expanded into Gulf states after Katrina and Rita in 2006 and mobilized funding after the 2013 Moore, Oklahoma tornado. The rest of the year, it is simply the place where a teacher's specific need meets a stranger's willingness to help.
The company's founding insight - that people give more readily when they can see exactly what they are giving to - has quietly become one of the more durable ideas in modern philanthropy. A lunchroom conversation about books nobody could afford turned into $1.6 billion worth of them, delivered.