When searching around for ideas for charitable donations last year we came across Donors Choose, a website that enables you to choose exactly to which project at which schools mostly your donation will go to. They make the admin costs of each project explicit and you can choose part of the project, all of it, or al of it plus the minimal admin cost (to cover the website hosting & admin stuff).
As we’re fortunate enough to be able to give a little here and there, we gave a modest amount to an elementary (primary for those outside the US) school in Brooklyn via this website. We got an initial email in return saying thanks with a promise for more details as to how the kids were using the stuff we paid for, including letters from the kids.
And boy, what more we got! This week we received a letter from the teacher plus 15+ handwritten letters from the 8-9 year-old children plus a bunch of photos of them at work using the stuff we helped them get. It’s truly uplifting stuff.
It is both heart-breaking and scandalous that these kids have to rely on donations in a city as rich as New York and a country with such abundance as America. But it’s also heartening that you can make a direct difference to some kids lives.
It also supports schools in places such as Louisiana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, North Carolina and others and I make no apologies for banging on about it. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a great example of how the web can cut out intermediary costs and get money to where real problems exist, and quickly.