When elementary school music and chess teacher Elizabeth Flocker Aming took a job at Oak Grove Elementary School in North Miami Beach, Florida, in 2008, she quickly realized she would face enormous challenges.
“Music and chess are considered luxuries,” she tells The Progressive. “Ninety percent of the kids at Oak Grove are from low-income, immigrant families. Many have never had an instrument even though they are musically inclined. Their parents often work three jobs and have little money for extras.”
That’s where crowdfunding comes in. Flocker Aming has repeatedly turned to DonorsChoose, an online platform that, since its founding, has raised more than $1.7 billion from more than six million donors for public schools and educators. DonorsChoose allows potential donors to search its website for requests to fulfill in classrooms across the country, such as basic supplies and healthy snacks.
But, while teachers at 89 percent of U.S. public schools have signed up to use DonorsChoose, crowdfunding has not been able to close the funding gap for many teachers.
DonorsChoose was founded by former Bronx high school teacher Charles Best in 2000. According to Juan Brizuela, the company’s senior manager of public relations, it was initially intended to be a local initiative. “Crowdfunding was not even a term then, but somehow Oprah Winfrey heard about the program and invited us to talk about it on her show,” Brizuela tells The Progressive. “Afterward, our website crashed due to the volume of traffic. This made us realize that we could increase our outreach and go national.”
Each day, between 80,000 and 100,000 individual requests are submitted and posted on the site, Brizuela says. The average ask is for $530, typically for supplies such as books, phonics materials, math and learning games, headphones, projectors, and other instructional technology. In addition, Brizuela says that solicitations for food, clothing, and personal hygiene items have become increasingly frequent. “A lot of teachers go above and beyond and create ‘care closets’ for the children, with coats, hats, scarves, sweaters, and gloves,” he says. This is a particularly acute need in schools that have seen an influx of migrant children coming from warmer climates.
The process for getting the items to teachers is straightforward. “Teachers put together a short request and describe how the items will benefit their students and support their teaching,” Brizuela explains. “Once they raise the money, they put the items into a cart. We then work with vendors, place the order, and ship the materials to the school.”
Flocker Aming stresses that the process is easy, but admits that it can be time-consuming. “Some days I spent three hours on fundraising, between writing my own requests and helping other teachers who are less familiar with the process,” she says. “I never see it as a burden though. I love what I do and am grateful to DonorsChoose for funding classroom needs.“
Flocker Aming is particularly impressed by the group’s vision and promotion of equity and fairness. A recent $500,000 matching grant from Dick’s Sporting Goods, for example, was launched through the platform last fall to ensure that competitive sports and fitness instruction are provided in under-resourced public schools.
This initiative and others like it were crafted in response to a 2022 report by The Education Trust, a national education policy organization, which indicated that schools serving majority Black and brown populations receive significantly less state and local funding than those serving majority white populations.
The report’s findings were stark: “Schools that serve Black, Latino, and Native students receive less state and local money—$2700 per student—than districts with fewer students of color.”
Brizuela says that DonorsChoose, in response to this data, has become more proactive about helping to combat these disparities.
The platform has also stepped up its work in response to the loss of government funding for public education. The Education Law Center reports that between 2008 and 2018, state and local disinvestment in public schools amounted to a loss of approximately $600 billion. While COVID-19 funds temporarily eased existing deficits, that money stream has now expired. As a result, many teachers not only rely on DonorsChoose, but also use their own personal funds to buy school supplies and materials for their classrooms. In 2024, Chalkbeat reported that more than 90 percent of teachers spend their own money on supplies such as snacks, pens and pencils, paper, and air filters. The average yearly expenditure for teachers is $610, a hefty sum for workers whose average salaries range from $52,870 in West Virginia to $100,789 in California.
Sherri Jackson, a fifth grade English language arts teacher in a South Bronx charter school, knows that this can be a huge sacrifice for teachers and their families. She relies on DonorsChoose, she says, for many of the things her students need—including books for a multilingual library so that students who are learning English can read in their native languages.
“I previously raised money to buy warm clothing for kids living in shelters,” says Jackson. “Another project allowed me to purchase journals for the kids to use when they were feeling sad or anxious. Having a safe place to express what they’re feeling has been extremely important for them. Our school has budget issues and while I have spent money out of pocket, I have two children so I can’t do this very often.”
Similarly, Emmanuela Louis, a fourth grade teacher at Frederick Douglass Elementary School in Miami, Florida, has raised funds through DonorsChoose to buy Spanish, Russian, and Creole-to-English dictionaries for her students. She’s also used the site to give newcomer students—who arrive throughout the year—pencils, pens, book bags, and school uniforms. “I never know what students will need until they arrive,” she says. “DonorsChoose has come in handy for clothes, food, and other necessities.”
Louis says that her biggest fundraising achievement, and one that she is most proud of, was to secure funding for an after-school culinary class. “Students had shared their struggles with food insecurity, so we made three different kinds of trail mix, yogurt parfaits, and fruit smoothies. Everything was made with healthy ingredients. I raised money for the blender and food items and got everything I asked for. The students loved it.”
That said, DonorsChoose cannot meet every need. John Russell, a ninth and tenth grade language and literature teacher at Navajo Preparatory School in Farmington, New Mexico, also coaches the debate team. “I don’t need money for a particular purchase,” he says, “but need an account to draw on in specific situations, say, to pay the meet fee for a student who does not have enough money to pay it. I understand that DonorsChoose wants to make sure that money is spent as intended, but for me, GoFundMe has worked better, allowing me to open a bank account that I can use for incidental expenses as they crop up. But if I needed thirty copies of a book, DonorsChoose would be ideal.”
Olivia Stow, a kindergarten teacher in a Charlottesville, Virginia, area school, tells The Progressive that while she is grateful that DonorsChoose exists, much more is needed. “Teachers have to jump through a lot of hurdles to find resources for our students so we can do our jobs,” she says. “My school serves more than 600 low-income migrants from Afghanistan, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. We give them two meals a day, but they still have many concrete, material needs. Everything falls on schools and we try to do it all, providing food, clothing, and housing assistance; meeting our students’ social and emotional needs; and helping them access healthcare. We also deal with the impact of gun and gang violence. We need much more community support.”