Gratitude

In celebration of national Volunteer Appreciation Week, we’re honored to share this guest post. Read, enjoy, and come volunteer with us! My name is Emily Chandler, a special education high school teacher from Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been volunteering with DonorsChoose.org almost as long as I’ve been a teacher. Six years of volunteering has allowed me to watch DonorsChoose.org evolve through three different offices and be amazed by all the new faces who chose to work and volunteer in the name of Educational Awesomeness. I’ve checked in thousands of thank you packages, written hundreds of thank you notes to donors… and I

There’s no other place where a teacher can experience the magic of writing a few paragraphs that turn into a box of classroom materials. Nothing compares to the feeling of finding out your project is fully funded, except perhaps the day supplies arrive and your students see the results of your hard work for the first time. But what happens in between? Enter our Project Fulfillment team, known around the office by their acronym, “PF.” This brilliant group of people makes sure that every teacher with a funded project gets the supplies they’ve requested, from a simple box of pencils

Since this school year began, over 400,000 people have come to DonorsChoose to help fund roughly 120,000 classroom requests from teachers across the country. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re one of those generous people… THANK YOU! We all know that the best way to show teachers our support and appreciation is to fund a project so that they can have the resources and experiences their students need to succeed. Yet there’s another way that you can help: by sharing DonorsChoose with other people in your life. With the holidays fast approaching, there’s never been a better

Donors, without your generosity, we wouldn’t be able to deliver millions of resources every year to classrooms across the nation. In 2019 so far, you helped fund 253,767 projects, helping millions of students. As teachers celebrated, their students unleashed their creativity, creating thank-you notes for the supporters who believed in them. This year, donors received over 129,000 thank-you notes from inspired, grateful children! In the words of Jennifer Mao, who runs the volunteer program at DonorsChoose: “In this digital age, old-fashioned handwritten student thank-yous are still woven into the DNA of our site.”  These thank-you notes connect supporters and teachers