Are You Doing Your Part for Science?

Posted Tue, March 10, 2009 - 5:41 PM
science

Usually the mail isn't very exciting - it brings you lots of junky "savings" inserts, crappy credit card offers, tax forms (or an audit if you're lucky), and maybe a notice of jury duty. So I was pleasantly surprised to find something undeniably positive in the mailbox today. But to explain it, I'll have to digress.

To bear some responsibility

In the fall of last year (yeah, bad timing...) I made a decision to start donating small portions of my income to various causes that I find not only worthy, but particularly appropriate to my personality. I want to continue doing this every month or two, and so far I've helped to fund the Nature Conservancy, Minnesota Public Radio (maybe that's not a real charitable donation, but I passed on the free "gift", so there!) - and a relatively obscure charity called Donors Choose. Normally, its a good idea to stick with well known and well established organizations, but this particular one came with a recommendation from someone I trust. And interestingly, they have a modus operandi other charities might do well to adopt.

Many established charities, although effective, don't usually provide any sort of direct connection between your dollars and the actual programs they fund. Generally your donation will go into a revenue pool, and goes into one column of the ledger; program funding, administrative overhead, fundraising efforts, employee salaries, and operating expenses go into the other side of the ledger. You can understand this approach from a purely business standpoint - it provides the greatest amount of flexibility, and allows the organization to intelligently manage their budget and be able to weather the lean times as well as the flush ones. But at the same time, there's usually not any one thing you can point to and say, "Look, I helped to do that."

Donors Choose works a little differently. It was founded in 2000 by a teacher at a NY public high school in the Bronx who was frustrated by the lack of access to effective teaching tools. You know all those jokes on the Simpsons - about the history textbooks in Mrs. Krabappel's classroom that don't yet have the Vietnam War, or the campy "Moon" video from the 1950s? Well, the reason we laugh at that is because we all know there's a element of truth to it. Teaching is hard, and teaching effectively can be even harder - but yet there's no shortage of dedicated people who most certainly don't go into the field for fame and fortune, and it's reprehensible that as a society, we seem to do our best to make their jobs as hard as possible - especially considering the consequences.

Donors Choose allows teachers to submit (modest) classroom project proposals, and then prospective donors can browse the proposals and pick one that piques their interest. Donations do go to that particular project, and you can constantly monitor the status of a particular project and watch as others donate in turn.

Obviously, there's a lot of detail that I've omitted, and I don't need to plug them further since they do a fine job on their own site. But I will note three things:

1. A program like this seems like it would be very hard to manage without effective use of the Internet. And they've done that, which distinguishes them from organizations with more traditional fundraising programs.
2. There's a great deal of transparency - from project location and scope statement, through a donations listing with (optional) comments from donors, a complete cost breakdown and a project history (available as publicly accessible PDFs).
3. People who tip a project over to being fully funded, plus those who donate a certain minimum, are sent a thank-you package from the classroom they have benefited, thus closing the circle.

Getting specific

So last fall, I browsed the site for projects, and naturally gravitated towards the science education section. Eventually I chose a project out of a middle school science classroom in Washington State. The teacher wanted to purchase materials for demonstrating the electromagnetic spectrum, and doing simple spectroscopy of element samples. Her purpose was to show how every element has a unique "fingerprint", and not only that, but show how we clever humans have figured out how to use those "fingerprints" to discover things about the stars, and in fact the whole universe of things that are so far away, we could never hope to touch in a lifetime.

If you think about it, spectroscopy is one of the most fundamentally important experimental techniques that we use to discover things about the world, and it's used all over the place. That's what attracted me to this project; explaining these concepts to 12 year olds, in an appropriate way, lays the foundation for them to later understand how much of human scientific knowledge got to the point where it is. Indeed, against the background of the recent launch of the Kepler mission, it is too much to imagine that the middle school student of today could eventually become the lead author on a paper announcing the discovery of free oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet in the habitable zone of a nearby red dwarf?

Personally, that's an investment that I'm willing to put a lot into.

At the end of October, the teacher "Mrs. B" [I've withheld her full name] posted this:

Well, today I got a package in the mail, full of construction paper, that included this (and several more):

-- from Chris

Mrs. B's classroom is in Key Peninsula Middle School, Lakebay, WA just west of Tacoma. One student wrote:

Now if that doesn't make you want to get up and send off a few bucks, I don't know what will. It's an excellent way to fundraise - let people know they're appreciated. I see it as a win-win situation.

And sure, my practical side knows that maybe only one or two students out of thirty will remember this assignment at the end of the year (although hoping for better.) But, you can't be surprised at a barren landscape if you don't bother to plant a seed every once in a while.

The thank-you notes are addressed anonymously because I chose not to give my name or address to the recipients, although I obviously did to the charity. And they've been quite good - I haven't gotten any junk mail, and no persistent solicitations from them.

-- from Rachael