Charles Best

No More Gatekeepers

Charles shares how, as a 24-year-old teacher at a Bronx high school, he created a model of giving hailed as “the future of philanthropy” by The New York Times. His story covers the high school wrestling coach who inspired him to become a

teacher, the most humiliating mistake he ever made getting DonorsChoose.org off the ground, and the most poignant moments, such as the projects teachers created to recover from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Today,

teachers at 79% of all the public schools in America have created projects on DonorsChoose.org, and more than 3 million people have given $700 million.

Charles connects this story to the rise of Kickstarter and Etsy, sites that—like DonorsChoose.org—enable anyone to go public with their originality. These sites signal a profound change in how long you have to wait, and who you represent a new kind of marketplace where gatekeepers no longer stand in your way.

Charles enables the audience to experience this change by giving everyone a DonorsChoose.org gift card (underwritten by his speaker’s fee) to spend on a classroom project of their choice, so they can directly connect with a classroom in need.

Pushing Intelligence Out to the Edge

In launching DonorsChoose.org out of his Bronx classroom, Charles Best pioneered the crowd-funding movement. Today, teachers at 79% of all the public schools in America have created project requests on DonorsChoose.org, and more than 3 million people have donated $700 million.

That scale of growth has spurred Charles and his team to tap the power of both crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, making DonorsChoose.org the first charity ever named to Fast Company’s list of the “50 Most Innovative Companies in the World.” Charles explains how the DonorsChoose.org team has:

• Opened up a mountain of data so that people can discover what schools most need and which teaching topics are trending, inspiring hundreds of web developers to build apps that engage the public in public schools.
• Crowdsourced many aspects of integrity assurance and quality control, a shift that has delivered huge productivity gains as well as cost savings.
• Turned DonorsChoose.org into a platform that companies like Google, Facebook, Starbucks, and Chevron are using to do cause marketing, to engage their customers and employees in philanthropy, and to “do well by doing good.”

Charles concludes by giving everyone a DonorsChoose.org gift card (underwritten by his speaker’s fee) to spend on a classroom project of their choice.