As a way to increase its support for Bay Area charter schools and Teach For America classrooms, Koret awarded a $20,000 challenge grant to DonorsChoose, an innovative organization that harnesses the power of the Internet to bring citizen philanthropists together to support specific classroom-based projects.
Public school teachers submit funding requests to DonorsChoose for classroom materials, projects, field trips, or other educational activities. Internet users can then search the site to find projects they would like to fund, and 100 percent of the money the donated goes directly to that project. The Koret grant not only helped fund individual teacher projects but also improve the DonorsChoose website search capabilities. As a result, 57 percent of the Koret Challenge projects, which focused on Teach For America classrooms and charter schools throughout the Bay Area, were fully funded within four weeks.
Funding requests for the Koret-sponsored projects ranged from portable microscopes for backcountry investigations to a listening center for struggling readers, art supplies, world maps, and other learning materials for classrooms from kindergarten to high school grade levels.