Can You Give $5 to a School in Need?

Ok, raise your hand.

How many of you have kids? Yup, so do I.

Oh, no? Ok. How many of you went to public school? Yup me too.

How many of you think every child should have equal access to books, supplies, playground equipment and technology at school? Heck, yeah.

How many of you have five dollars? Shoot, even *I’ve* got that.

…How many of you might even have a little more? Ok, stop laughing.

Here’s the deal folks. You all know how hung up on giving I have been recently. Well, I guess I have been making enough racket about it that I was approached about a wonderful cause. It is called the DonorsChoose.org 2008 Bloggers Challenge.

DonorsChoose.org is a non for profit website aimed at collecting wish lists from teachers at schools in need. The website organizes and lists their needs based on state, poverty level, subject, etc. Then folks who have a little to give come and visit the site, pick a project, and donate to it. Easy as that. Donations can even be as low as $5 and all donations are tax deductible. Very cool, huh? (More details about how it works can be found here.)

And how do bloggers get involved? Well, we get to promote the site from our blog. (And no, we don’t make a dime off of this, I promise you.) We simply get to encourage all of *YOU* readers to visit their site and donate. And I have even taken the liberty of setting up a special “Morningside Mom Givers” page. This afternoon, I went through the site and dug out four projects that seemed to resonate with me.

What was I looking for? That was tough. It seemed so arbitrary to pick projects and decide which were more worthy than others. I finally decided to look into lower income schools in Florida and I found five really interesting projects. I encourage you all to go onto the site and read about them.

One is looking to provide children instruments in a North Miami school.

One simply needs books because they have practically none.

One is looking for P.E. equipment at a school with no playground, one ball and 1/3 of their students are overweight.

One is looking for technology to bring math alive to her students.

One is looking to buy “green” books to help educate students about recycling in their communities.

All of the projects together have put a total for our Morningside Mom Givers Project at $3,000. I am asking you to give a little when you can. Has anyone joined the 29 day Giving Challenge I have been obsessed with? This would SO count. And so would spreading the word about my page. See if you can get some others to check this out and donate if possible. It’s a wonderful cause. I sincerely hope you will consider visiting our page and learning more.

And I am also planning on some sort of incentive for giving. I am not sure what it will be. Possibly a raffle for a give-away. Or maybe I will promise to do something crazy for all of you to laugh at. Last year one blogger dressed up as a tomato and danced through Rockefeller Square when they reached their goal. Oh the possibilities, huh? I’ll keep you posted. Any suggestions are always welcome.

Thanks in advance to every Morningside Mom Giver!

Note: I’d have a cool widget up if I could get it to work. Instead go click on the simple text widget on the right panel if you ever need to find our page!