By STEPHANIE STROM
What if charities ran like
eBay?
A Web site would list
projects that need money. A charitably inclined fellow would scroll through the
list until he spotted one he liked. He then could write a check meant for that
program and that program alone.
One charity already works
this way: DonorsChoose. It was begun to help New York City schoolteachers find
money for supplies, projects and field trips. But the idea is the talk of the
philanthropic world.
"With other charities,
you send them a check and it disappears, not exactly into a void, but you don't
know specifically what's being done with your money," said Donald Eyres, a
resident of Minnetonka, Minn., who has made contributions to pay for three
DonorsChoose proposals. "Here, you can very specifically pick out a
project and be responsible for it directly. I really see this as being the
charity of the future."
So do seasoned
philanthropists, who regard DonorsChoose with a mixture of awestruck admiration
and terror. "Frankly, it makes me nervous," said Phyllis Freedman,
executive vice president at Epsilon, a consulting firm with a large nonprofit
practice. "What DonorsChoose does is take the middle man out of the
equation, and that middleman is the charity who is my client. But this is where
donors are going, intellectually and emotionally."
Since it began two years
ago, some 170 donors, more than half of whom live outside New York State, have
financed 215 teacher proposals on DonorsChoose, channeling $120,000 to projects
that benefited more than 12,000 students.
It worked for Eileen
O'Rourke's first graders at P.S./I.S. 123 in the Bronx. Her students were so
ecstatic on class outings and field trips that they had a hard time remembering
what they saw and learned. Ms. O'Rourke decided that clipboards would solve the
problem. The children could tote them along and jot down their observations.
But there were not enough clipboards at the school for each child in class.
Less than 24 hours after
her request for $49 to purchase 35 brown Masonite clipboards was posted on the
DonorsChoose Web site, Donorschoose.org, a donor agreed to finance it.
"They were in my classroom within a week and a half," Ms. O'Rourke
said. "It was unbelievable."
DonorsChoose neatly
addresses a fast-growing trend in contemporary philanthropy, that donors simply
want greater control over their gifts. "Philanthropists today want to be
involved with their giving, they want to touch it and feel it and understand
it," said Janet Atkins, president and chief executive of Philanthropic
Advisors in Boston.
That became obvious after
Sept. 11, when donors became incensed over a plan by the American National Red
Cross to use a portion of the money it collected after the attacks to develop a
new terrorism response program. So intense was the anger that the Red Cross
gave up its plan, promised to spend all $997 million it raised on victims of
the disaster and completely overhauled its fund-raising practices.
Charles Best, a 26-year-old
public-school teacher in the Bronx, grasped this mood nearly three years ago
when he dreamed up DonorsChoose. "I was on a trip to South America to
study sculpture, and it just came to me," he said.
He ran the idea past a
group of close friends, all of whom, like him, were alumni of either St. Paul's
School, a prep school in Concord, N.H., or Yale University or both. LeBoeuf,
Lamb, Greene & MacRae, the law firm where his father was a partner, offered
help to establish DonorsChoose as a nonprofit corporation, and two years ago,
DonorsChoose went live.
"Our belief is that
this is a democracy, donors choose," said Husani Barnwell, creative
director and former streaking partner of Mr. Best's at St. Paul's.
Mr. Best spent two-thirds
of his salary to cover the organization's administrative expenses, turning his
apartment over for office space and moving in with his parents. (His partners
later discovered he was the donor behind 10 of the 11 proposals financed during
the trial run — and his aunt financed the other one.)
"If you work as a
teacher, it's just obvious to you that something like this is needed,"
said Rosa Rivera-McKutchen, a former teacher who is now operations director of
DonorsChoose. "You want your own overhead projector, you subsidize it.
Crayons? You buy them."
DonorsChoose has created
some friction in the school system's bureaucracy. A district superintendent who
had approved a junior high school class's oceanography field trip that was
financed through DonorsChoose suddenly and without explanation revoked his
permission, forcing the bus carrying the students to the trip to turn around
midway. DonorsChoose never got an explanation. "This is a model designed
to work around the bureaucracy, but sometimes that doesn't happen," Mr.
Best said.
And some worry that the
success the Web site has had so far may not continue. "It's still a very
small operation," said Vincent Stehle, a program officer at the Surdna
Foundation, where he evaluates nonprofit programs. He is considering a grant
for DonorsChoose, but said, "I'm afraid all the publicity is going to
overwhelm them, just like the hype ultimately killed the Internet boom."
But despite the ruffled
feathers and the concerns, DonorsChoose is hoping to expand to other cities,
including Washington and Cincinnati. It has already had an impact in Kuwait.
Just after Sept. 11,
Madeline Morris, a first-grade teacher in the girls' school at the American
Creativity Academy in Kuwait, got in touch with DonorsChoose, asking it to help
her get materials for a social studies project on New York City. DonorsChoose
proposals must come from teachers in the New York City public school system,
but it was not too hard to find a teacher in New York to write a proposal for
his class to send items to a school in Kuwait to help promote understanding.
In no time, the proposal
was financed, and — notwithstanding the initial suspicions of Kuwaiti customs
officials — each girl in Ms. Morris's classroom had her own New York Fire
Department or "I Love New York" T-shirt, a book about New York and
other goodies. "This was beyond my wildest imagination," said Ms.
Morris, a former Air Force officer. "It was a great opportunity to
establish a small bridge between the two countries — and it was so easy."
Mr. Best and his aunt serve
as the official board of DonorsChoose, but philanthropy experts say it will
need a bigger, more independent board to govern it going forward. (Mr. Best
said he expected a more formal board to be in place within two months.) It does
not yet have an ironclad means of covering its costs, although most donors do
click on a box that asks them to contribute 10 percent of the value of their
donation to pay for administrative costs. And DonorsChoose has received two
$100,000 grants, one from the Goldman Sachs Foundation and the other from the
AOL Time Warner Foundation.
The charity has tried to
insulate itself from abuses. Roughly 14 percent of the 450 proposals submitted
to it have not been posted on the Web site, like one teacher's request for
money to finance her trip to Cuba, along with a camera and photographers to
document it. The charity also makes sure no money ever passes through the hands
of the teachers writing proposals. Instead, it purchases the supplies,
equipment, tickets and other items and sends copies of the receipts to donors.
"We've tried to
eliminate the potential problems," said Mr. Barnwell, the creative
director.
Donors also receive
elaborate packages of thank you notes and photos from teachers whose proposals
have been backed.
"They've been very
clever and creative in terms of the mechanism they've established to link
people — often with very modest means but who can be donors — to very clear
needs," said Christopher Harris, a program officer at the Ford Foundation
who visited DonorsChoose's offices.
"The philanthropic
infrastructure needs these kinds of ideas to address the changes taking place
in the landscape almost daily," he said.