Charles Best

It just felt wrong that the kids I was teaching didn't have the same access to materials that I did when I was a student.

Teachers know how to improve education.

Teachers know how to improve education, but they are a voice that is consistently overlooked or ignored.

An art project, a hands-on science experiment, or a special field trip can transcend textbooks and flash cards. No one knows this better than those teaching students with autism.

I'm not tech savvy at all.

Committed teachers know their students' needs better than anyone in the system. Traditionally, however, teachers have little control over the purchase of student materials.

If anything, we hope that DonorsChoose.org is going to be a prompt, a nudge in the side of the public school system to improve and to start delivering these materials and experiences that students need and to make it easier for teachers to innovate.

At DonorsChoose.org, we've seen what technology can do for a classroom. We make it easy for teachers to request the materials they need most for their classrooms and for donors to make a meaningful contribution to education.

If you track your organization's creativity by the number of brainstorms on your calendar, you're missing out. It's more important to capture those unplanned sparks of inspiration that so often come when we're cooking dinner, taking a shower, or commuting to work.

I think it's the strength of the idea that's made Donors Choose work, not me. I mean, I'm determined, and I work hard, but so does everyone else.

I get my share of 'cold' requests via LinkedIn from people who are launching non-profit or for-profit ventures and who request a meeting to get my input or help. I wish I could say yes to all of them, but given limited bandwidth, I say yes to the subset who've written a compelling description of their work and who are underrepresented.

I created DonorsChoose by putting pencil to paper - literally - and sketching out each screen of the web site and how it would work. Then I paid a programmer from Poland $1,500 to turn my sketches and common-sense rules into a functioning website.