Donors Choose: You Could Help a Classroom By Shopping

I'm on the Donors Choose e-list and received this e-mail that I thought might be of some interest. I'm only posting because Donors Choose is a good organization that helps teachers fund projects. So, if for any reason you shop at The Gap, Banana Republic or Old Navy, you can get a good deal AND you will help teachers fund projects in their classrooms. (Gap owns BR and ON so you can shop at any of them and money will go to Donors Choose.) Note: it says in-store and not on-line.

From today through Sunday (November 12-15), you can receive 30% off any in-store purchase at the GAP, Banana Republic and Old Navy.

You'll be doing good at the same time -- the GAP will give 5% of what you spend to high-need classrooms through DonorsChoose.org.

Print the 30% off coupon and take it to the store with you.

Comments

zb said…
I contribute frequently through donors choose, and recommend it highly, to both teachers and parents. If you know a classroom teacher who is looking for resources, and the school system permits them to participate (not all do), I believe they can fairly quickly set up a request. This request might generate donations from everywhere, but most concretely, it can be used as a means to donate directly to the project by families associated with the school (which could include just parents, but also grandparents, colleagues, etc, the same people you might hit up for wrapping paper sales).

As a donor, a very cool feature is the individualized thank you notes. I recently donated to a project in the Olympic Peninusula, donating preserved sharks for an anatomy project. I received, in return, the most delightful thank you notes from the students. Unlike projects like Heifer international, these projects are donated directly to an individual group of kids.

And, since the kids/teachers are requesting the kinds of things a child can understand, it's a very nice site with which to introduce giving to your own children. My daughter also read the shark thank you notes, and was delighted. My kindergartner picked out a project on reading to donate to and my daughter donated Time for Kids, when she herself was enjoying reading it. They both loved reading the notes they received in return -- the teacher who received Time for Kids directed her children in making Time Magazine covers, which were an absolutely perfect thank you note for my daughter.

Melissa: I don't know if it's appropriate, but one of the features Donors Choose allows is a "giving page" that allows bloggers to direct giving to a group of projects (for example, ones in Seattle) through their blogging sites. That might be a nice way to introduce readers of this blog to the site.
zb said…
PS: And, I posted this question in another thread. But I'm a donor. I would like to hear from teachers about drawbacks to the donors choose model from their point of view. There's the obvious drawback -- I hate using donations to fill in budget holes, and I worry about this periodically. But, are there other snafus that make it difficult for teachers to use Donors Choose?

(Oh, and I'm not associated with DC, except as a donor).
mkd said…
We're going to OLD NAVY tomorrow. My kids "stored" my winter clothes in one of those vacuum bags, put it in the basement and now can't find it. We have the old electric floor heaters and I don't feel very safe using them. If you're cold, I tell my kids to put on a sweatshirt. Of course, it's kind of silly to be wearing long underwear in the house . . .
mkd said…
Whether you love or hate my past posts, I thought the first paragraph is too IMPORTANT to ignore:

A correction regarding my report on books at Rainier Beach: I found my younger son using one of our old homeschool books, PUBLISHED IN 1993, World Cultures: A Global Mosaic, a text where I learned Saddam was still alive and in power and Myanmar was still Burma. This is the history text used in his class and I bet you'd agree with me that this text is way out-of-date. No wonder teachers choose to use their own curricula. Perhaps the money being donated (or if money is available in the budget) should be applied to new history books. (As for my copy, I bought it at a thrift store bag sale, $1.50 a bag.) Hopefully, my purchase can help fund more history resources for all the exceptional history teachers at RBHS.

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