The Small Steps to Big Progress

In just a few weeks, we’ll start our 20th back-to-school season at DonorsChoose, the education crowdfunding nonprofit I started with my students at a Bronx public high school in 2000. This fall, we’ll reach $1 billion raised for over 1.7 million projects that teachers across America have created on our site, requesting everything from construction paper and crayons to underwater robot kits. 

Back in 2000, I never imagined we'd achieve even a fraction of this scale. At that time, people were using dial-up Internet connections to make their first ever purchases on ebay or Amazon; before the term “crowdfunding” was a word or a thing. My students and I were operating DonorsChoose out of my classroom, and nearly all our teacher users were colleagues at that same school. 

Our biggest operational challenge was keeping track of the disposable cameras we sent teachers to take photos of classroom projects in action for their donors. Now, our biggest operational challenge is delivering materials to hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students who are at home during the pandemic. 

The path to the DonorsChoose of today wasn’t a handful of giant leaps forward, but a series of small steps, several bets, some real luck, and a lot of hard work and hustle by our team of staff and volunteers. Reid Hoffman was kind enough to let me share a few of those steps on Masters of Scale, with a special appearance by our board member and champion Stephen Colbert. I hope you’ll take a listen.