On Wednesday, DonorsChoose announced San Francisco-based Ripple donated $29 million to fund every classroom project request on the nonprofit’s crowdfunding platform. According to DonorsChoose, the donation fulfilled 35,647 requests from 28,210 public school teachers in every state. Teachers at 16,561 public schools, or 1in 6 of all the public schools in America, will receive books, school supplies, technology, field trips, and other resources vital for learning.
While sharing more details about the donation, Monica Long, SVP of Marketing at Ripple, stated:
“At Ripple, we care about giving back to our community and we collectively value the importance of quality education in developing the next generation of leaders. DonorsChoose.org’s track record speaks for itself — they are highly effective at improving the quality of education and the experience of teachers and students across America. We’re proud to work with them to support classroom needs across the country.”
Charles Best, Founder of DonorsChoose, also commented:
“We are awestruck by the generosity of the Ripple team. Their gift will provide learning materials and experiences to more than a million students, overwhelmingly in low-income communities. I doubt that there has ever been a day when more classroom dreams came true.”
DonorChoose then reported that the Ripple team’s donation provides the ultimate culmination of #BestSchoolDay, a campaign launched in March 2016 when 58 athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists funded classroom requests in cities and states covering just under half of the country. The crowdfunding platform added:
“For a limited time, as teachers generate new classroom project requests on the site, DonorsChoose will offer donors the option of giving to the #BestSchoolDay Fund, which will be used to support projects from teachers creating their first requests on the site. DonorsChoose estimates that teachers will submit at least another 135,000 classroom project requests between now and the start of the next school year.”
