Amy and I just funded all of the unfunded DonorsChoose projects in Alaska as part of the annual DonorsChoose #BestSchoolDay event. As part of the #BestSchoolDay program, your donation is matched. In all of the Alaska projects, Aspect Ventures matched our donation. Huge thanks to Jennifer Fonstad, Theresia Gouw, and team!
Amy grew up in Alaska and we have a house in Homer, which is what motivated us to support Alaska this year on #BestSchoolDay. As I was supporting projects, I saw one in Homer and a few Sphero and littleBits requests which made me smile.
We’ve been continuous supporters of DonorsChoose for many years. Whenever I have a shitty day, I often go to DonorsChoose and support a few projects. It’s generated some incredibly satisfying moments for me, like a connection with Monica Zamora, a fourth grade teacher in Edgewater, NJ. I funded several programs for her students including some BB-8s and some littleBits. I gave a 30 minute Skype talk to her class, where I met a budding CEO of a new company called SockWorld who pitched me on her new business around socks. Or, the time I got a note from Norma Gibson at Carr Creek Elementary in Littcarr, Kentucky. At her initiative, she pointed me to a number of projects at her school which we funded. Her appreciation – for her students – lept out through the email to me.
If you are motivated to participate, I encourage you to pick some projects on DonorsChoose in the city you grew up in.
Today, we funded 72 projects, which delights us. If you want to see a few examples, check out:
White Boards to Think It, Write It, and Share It!
Who, What, When and Where: Books With Answers
Got Power? We Need Charging Stations
Maker Space For Twenty-First Century Learners
When I sat down this morning with Amy she started reading off people who had funded entire cities worth of projects on DonorsChoose this morning. Amy has DonorsChoose in her twitter feed and we quickly figured out what was going on. I saw Fred Wilson’s post on #BestSchoolDay and we agreed to fully fund projects in a number of cities that we have connections to.
We ended up fully funding all the DonorChoose projects in Alaska, Boulder, Longmont, Brighton, Breckenridge, Richardson, and Detroit.
Some of these cities may be obvious to folks who know us. Amy grew up in Alaska and we have a house in Homer. We now live just outside of Boulder in Longmont. We have a ski place in Breckenridge (and it was the only city we could find in Summit County that had active projects.)
Brighton is a fun one for us. The wife of one of Amy’s cousin (Brie) is a teacher there. We just saw her at Amy’s mom’s funeral and talked about the amazing work she does as a teacher (she supervises / trains teachers in K – 8.) Funding everything in Brighton in honor of Brie felt good.
I grew up in Dallas and went to school in the Richardson Independent School District (RISD – Spring Creek Elementary, Westwood Junior High, and J.J. Pearce High School.) I had a number of teachers who had a meaningful impact on me and fondly remember several who became close friends as adults, especially Mrs. Wonderly. Funding all the projects in Richardson schools felt karmically good.
My partner Jason grew up in Detroit. We enthusiastically helped expand Techstars to Detroit and bought a house there for Techstars teams to live in during the program if they wanted to. We all think Detroit has the opportunity to be a great city again and Amy and I happily added it to our list of places to fund, even though we’ve never lived there.
We ended up funding around 50 projects to fully fund everything that was still active in these cities. If I’m inspired later today, I might do a few more cities so I’m open to suggestions – mostly of projects to fund that other readers of this blog have supported at some level.
So – go to DonorsChoose, fund something, and leave a link to the project in the comments and I’ll fund whatever you’ve contributed to.