Charles Best

Charles Best leads DonorsChoose.org, a website where every public school teacher can be a change-maker, and any citizen can be a philanthropist. At DonorsChoose.org, public school teachers post classroom project requests, and donors can pick the projects they want to support. Every donor then gets photographs and thank-you letters from the classroom he or she chose to help.

Charles founded DonorsChoose.org at Wings Academy, a public high school in the Bronx where he taught social studies for five years. He came to the idea during a conversation in the teachers’ lunch room, and his students volunteered to help start the organization. To date, 93,000 public school teachers have used DonorsChoose.org to secure over $30 million of books, art supplies, field trips, technology, and other resources that their students need to learn. Through the web site, “citizen philanthropists” have helped 2 million students from low-income families.