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December 3, 2024

Support classrooms providing direct care to their students this Giving Tuesday.

Today, we’re encouraging our community to support teachers providing thier students with warmth, food, and other direct needs. 100% of your donation goes to classrooms, and many classroom projects are matched today for Giving Tuesday, so your impact may go twice as far! Here are some examples of classrooms you can support.

• Ms. Mendoza from Houston, TX needs $124 more to provide sweatshirts for students to stay warm this winter. Support >

• Ms. Blevins in Kansas City, KS needs $160 more to provide snacks to her students who may have missed a meal. Support >

• Mr. Woodson from Charlottesville, VA needs $165 more to create care packages for the unhoused. Support >

• Ms. Lynch in Sleepy Hollow, NY needs just $181 more to provide shampoo, body wash and lip balm for her students. Support >

Explore all classroom projects that need basic necessities for kids to learn.

Not available to give money at this time? Here’s how you can carry the spirit of Giving Tuesday forward:

• Donate gently used items and school supplies. You can gather items you no longer need or organize collection drives in your neighborhood. Contact local schools, shelters, and family service organizations to determine what’s needed.

• Start or join a food security initiative. Many children face food insecurity, especially on weekends and during school breaks. Help by organizing weekend backpack programs that send food home with students, starting a community garden that donates produce to families, or volunteering with existing food banks and meal programs that serve children.

In Conversation with Kristina "Steen" Joye Lyles

Vice President, Equity & Impact at DonorsChoose

In a heartfelt conversation about educational equity and the power of community support, Nicole sat down with Kristina "Steen" Joye Lyles, SVP of Equity and Impact at DonorsChoose, to discuss the impact of support teachers’ commitment to the wellbeing of their children in classrooms across America.

Nicole: Kristina, thank you so much for being here. What does a day in your role look like for you?

Kristina: Right now, every day is different because the education climate continues to change. Part of what we believe at DonorsChoose is that we have to be responsive to the context that children are experiencing schooling. A big part of my team's work is exploring how we can rigorously and measurably advance education equity across classrooms in this country?

At DonorsChoose, we want to make sure any teacher in a K-12 public school who needs resources can request them on our site. About 90% of public schools in this country are using DonorsChoose, and we’ve had nearly a million educators on our platform request anything from diverse books that reflect their students identities, to robotics kits and coats for the winter. 

We know that teachers aren’t just teaching students lessons, but hold this added responsibility of making them feel safe, seen, comfortable and affirmed. When you visit our website, you’ll see teachers crowdfunding for translation service support for their students who are new to the U.S., or for coats for students who came from Ecuador and are now facing the Minnesota winter. Teachers need a wide range of resources for their classrooms.

What makes DonorsChoose a little different from other platforms is that when we support a teacher's need, we ship those resources directly to the classroom, so you don’t have to worry about whether these students will really receive the resources. We ensure end-to-end integrity. And what makes it extra fun is that you get pictures of students holding up their books, or typing on that laptop that you made possible. You can feel confident and inspired by the great work teachers do every single day to go the extra mile for their students.

What inspired you to join DonorsChoose?

I'm a lawyer by trade, and when I was in law school, I had the opportunity to teach street law in DC in the DC public school system. It sounds trite, but it changed my life—not just because of the incredible students who were so bright and smart, but it showed me that, by addressing educational inequity, there is a real opportunity to give every student the chance to unleash their brilliance.

I’ve got to shout out my muse, my grandmother. I'm wearing her ladybug broach today. As a military brat, I spent K-12 in twelve different public schools across the country. But my grandmother left school in third grade and was raised in rural South Carolina.

She was born in the 1930s, and we are now in 2024, but some of the same issues – like  access to opportunity, access to the resources we need to learn, access to unleashing our potential – persist. These are things that DonorsChoose is here to address.

Also, I'm a daughter of two educators, and I remember them reaching into their pockets for the resources they need. That's still happening. On average, teachers spend about $610 of their own money to get the things their classroom may need. We're at a crucial juncture in our education system. We have to learn how we can unleash the potential of every scholar who's got a seat, and, at scale, ensure that our systems actually make sense for all those scholars, especially students of color and students in low-income environments.

Absolutely, and I love that you have this focus on “Equity Focus Schools.” I'd love to hear a little bit more about that work.

Due to historical disadvantages and underinvestment, these schools particularly need our focus because their students aren't getting access to the resources they need to thrive, especially compared to their peer schools. That's why we created our "equity focused schools" designation, allowing us to direct our incredible reach and resources toward the classrooms, students, and teachers who need them most.

Last month, in September, we held our equity focused schools match day—where donors can come to our site and support classroom projects in these schools with matched donations. It became the biggest day for equity focused schools in DonorsChoose history: over 18,000 donors helped provide $3.7 million worth of resources to 13,000 classrooms. And when those boxes arrive—13,000 of them—it really means something.

Nicole’s note: This newsletter community helped raise $20,000 for this campaign! 

We have Giving Tuesday coming up,one of the largest charitable initiatives of the year. It's such a fantastic opportunity to invite people to create some conscious change where they live. What are your hopes for Giving Tuesday this year?

At DonorsChoose, our greatest hope is that amid all the festivity of the holiday season, people will pause when they reach Giving Tuesday and recognize this as the perfect moment to invest in what our students need right now. 

Our research shows that just one funded DonorsChoose classroom project makes a teacher 22% more likely to stay in the classroom. That $10 donation becomes a powerful investment. When two teachers in a school have funded projects, we see improved student outcomes in both ELA and math test scores.

While we have the research to prove the impact of classroom giving, at DonorsChoose we're also driven by heart. We want students to experience the joy of beautiful, abundant classrooms. We never know if that one book will inspire the next James Baldwin, or if that calculator might nurture our next Hidden Figures. It's personal for me—I remember a book from my elementary school days that opened my eyes to representation. Now, forty years later, that same transformative power drives our organization's mission.

I just want to do this and make my grandma proud because she didn’t get the opportunity to have her potential unleashed. I hope I can make her proud – and my two kids proud. I want to continue to pave the way for students like them to feel safe, affirmed and resourced at school.

What’s Giving Tuesday?

Giving Tuesday is a global generosity movement that occurs on each Tuesday following Thanksgiving in the United States (after Black Friday and Cyber Monday). It was created as a simple idea: a day that encourages people to do good and give back amidst a time of hyper-consumerism. Last year, people like you donated over $3.1B to causes that matter!