Pencils for kids
Several months ago I donated $169 to a poor school in Virginia so that a teacher could buy colored pencils and a pencil sharpener for her class.
Today I received an envelope full of thank-you notes from the kids, and they made me gasp.
In my life I like to think that I’ve done things that have helped people or contributed positively to the world.
But this — this moved me.
It was a small donation, but it was so… specific.
For a moment, I looked back on my 32 years and thought, “well, at least I did that.”
There are pictures of the kids with their new supplies on the donorschoose.org page for this donation.
I think I’ll be doing this again.
In fact, there’s a class in Mississippi that needs calculators…
Xav on 7 October 2009 at 1:25 pm
That’s the best thing living in a third world country: you can easily do an heart-warming action for a few bucks.
Xav on 7 October 2009 at 11:13 pm
I mean, here (like in most parts of Europe) you can’t find a school that miss pencils or such things.
Karl Lattimer on 7 October 2009 at 1:51 pm
I always hate giving money to charities like oxfam etc… which alot of the time spend the money on administration costs of their huge charity network. Only some of the money makes it to those who need it…
With this, you’ve given directly to people who need it, and I’m now looking for something I can do with this site. Its great that its a 1:1 relationship of donation:result
Karl Lattimer on 7 October 2009 at 2:19 pm
I followed your example and donated pencils and a sharpener… This seems like a useful donation to me.
Shame that this site isn’t world wide I’m sure there are people further a field in need too that would benefit from this.
Nat Friedman on 7 October 2009 at 8:10 pm
Awesome!
Yes, I agree. You might like kiva.org if you don’t already know about it. It’s not a donation, it’s a loan, but when it gets repaid you can loan it out again. So a small amount of money can help a lot of people. And kiva is worldwide.
Karl Lattimer on 8 October 2009 at 1:58 pm
Nope I didn’t know about that, I didn’t know that I could actually make a microloan myself! This is pretty cool
Early on 12 December 2011 at 6:16 pm
Perfcet answer! That really gets to the heart of it!
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Michael Kanis on 7 October 2009 at 2:52 pm
This is a great thing and the website is a great idea. Like Karl Lattimer said, it is better to donate directly to those who are in need, then to big charities. It’s heart warming to see those happy kids.
However this also makes me really, really sad. You live in one of the richest countries of the world and at the same time there are children in this country, that can’t afford coloured pencils.
In Germany we just neglected a “healthy-food program”, which would have provided daily fruit and vegetables for school kids. It would have cost 12.5m €. Nearly at the same time we afforded some war toys for 5.9 billion €.
This is not right.
Nat Friedman on 7 October 2009 at 8:11 pm
Yes, this makes me sad also. If my country can’t buy calculators and pencils for its children, it’s not going to remain rich forever.
Dave on 7 October 2009 at 7:47 pm
@Karl – this is one major problem within charitable orgs – people want to *see* their handiwork while some of the most important things simply aren’t visible. There will always be organizational costs, to any charitable endeavor but there are very very few people who want to give money that would allow these orgs to continue doing their good works because its mundane and there aren’t cute pictures to go along with it.
This is by no means an indictment of giving like Nat does, or getting a cute picture. It is simply an urging to rethink what it means to help a charitable org do the mundane things that allow them to do even bigger works of good.
Nat Friedman on 7 October 2009 at 8:07 pm
@Dave – I agree with what you’re saying, but I also like that sites like DonorsChoose obviate a lot of centralized organizational work (like identifying teachers in need) by crowdsourcing it.
Dave on 7 October 2009 at 8:15 pm
absolutely, these things are brilliant!
Karl Lattimer on 8 October 2009 at 2:13 pm
I see what you’re saying here about the big charities, and it’s not just about cute pictures. However nat has a point about the crowd sorting, the thing about the web is it lets lots of people connect to lots of people, so why not exploit that with systems like this which make it;
a) accountable to the donor, I know what my money is being spent on
b) selectable to the donor, I can choose what I spend my money on
c) informative to the donor, You know when something has been achieved and that re-enforces a positive feeling.
These are all the elements of a system that can organise itself, and the more individuals involved the greater the chance of success.
Consider for a moment, disaster relief efforts and how they’re organised, if you could imagine a network, similar to this in which organisations, nations and charities can all connect at the same time as the average joe, and select what resources they can donate.
For example nations donate x number of rescue workers of a specific type, which are available and can be there in a specific time frame. Organisations donate heavy lifting equipment, earth movers and various other tools which are required, charities can send rescue workers, food and medical supplies, other forms of aid like tents etc… Individuals could donate funds to assist charities specific goals, or any other specific goals which need to be achieved.
As long as the publicity is put in place when disaster relief efforts are started then having a system like this which is accountable, selectable and informative would not only prevent corruption from slipping in, but would also attract wider support for any relief efforts…
Of course, if you could consider a globally connected system like this wouldn’t only run in those circumstances, it could run continuously…
I think this is slightly better than charities like the NSPCC blanket advertising on TV at enormous cost, NLP ridden and emotionally intensive adverts, every time something happens to a child… even if its a child they couldn’t possibly have helped… and yet the cost associated with those adverts is tremendous.
Will Yancey on 8 October 2009 at 6:22 am
Nat,
I read Waldo’s blog a lot and this is one of the coolest little philanthropic things I’ve seen in a while. Well done.
Will
Charlottesville, VA
Thomas on 8 October 2009 at 5:26 pm
I find it really stunning that there are schools so poor in the USA.
It is certainly great to help them, but I also hope there are people trying to make the school system better to avoid to have such poorly funded schools.
Nat Friedman on 8 October 2009 at 5:54 pm
Schools are funded by local property taxes. People complain about their property taxes and this is what happens.
Viveka Weiley on 15 April 2010 at 6:00 am
Then this is a structural problem. Schools should be funded per-child from Federal revenue. Otherwise schools in poor areas will have less funding than schools in rich areas; this perpetuates poverty. Many other countries understand this, why not the US?
In a society that believes in advancement through merit (as I understand the consensus position of the US polity to be), it should be easy to understand that children are not to blame for the poverty of their parents or their neighborhoods. Access to comprehensive education should be considered a basic human right.
I think it’s stunning that the US chooses to waste the intellectual potential of its children in so profligate a manner. As it seems there’s no political will to fix the problem at its systemic root, I commend Nat for acting directly.
V.
Alex Sandoval on 9 October 2009 at 4:56 am
CONGRATULATIONS!
Go on!
Alex
Tomeu on 9 October 2009 at 3:41 pm
Pardon for the plug, but if you are a GNOME hacker and would like to impact the learning outcome of hundreds of thousands of children in developing countries around the world, please consider helping out with Sugar:
http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/09/free-education-as-in-free-speech.html
It’s expected that before the end of this year 2 million children will be using Sugar to improve their learning in countries such as Rwanda, Peru, Uruguay, Nigeria and Nepal.
Sugar Labs is 100% volunteer based and all the help we get makes an impact in the learning of those children.
Jason on 15 October 2009 at 9:14 pm
Nat,
Thank you for mentioning this. This really made me think. I am looking at it now. Some of these things are so simple, yet so hard to learn without.
I am going to pass this around to people that I know. The more people who can contribute a few dollars the better.
Best,
-Jason
Amy on 23 October 2009 at 6:15 pm
Hey friend –
I was just checking in on you to see what you’ve been up to. This entry gave me the chills. Well played.
Amy (MITLL Amy)