The scienceblogs crew is pushing a new charity for the next few weeks: an outfit called DonorsChoose, which collects funding requests from teachers and tries to match them up with people willing to pass along a few dollars. They have a long, long list of teachers looking for help in their classrooms; what we sciencebloggers have done is picked a subset of the requests that each of us like and grouped them into a challenge. My challenge contains a dozen science-related requests, and now my job is to beg you, the readers of Pharyngula, to take a look at them and if you can, kick in a few dollars to help them out.
If you look to the sidebar on the left, you’ll see a status bar showing how close we are to funding those requests. It’s at a pathetic 0% right now, but it would be nice to see it fill up.
I said that a lot of us here at scienceblogs are doing this; Janet has a complete list, so if you’d rather help out one of the other blogs meet their goal, please do. All that matters is that teachers get help, not which of us helps out.
Also, there will be a random drawing at the end of our efforts, and donors have a chance of winning various small tchotchkes. Again, Janet has the details, including the list of fabulous prizes.
$25 for the kids of Chicago. This is a fantastic idea, BTW, now I have to go match the contribution somewhere on the physics side of things.
Up to 7% now — $25 bucks for science compensates for some of the donations my wife makes
For you guys still in your salad days and unable to make a contribution, here’s a suggestion:
Go to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute website. They have some free DVDs of great interest…(ahem)…FREE.
Request a copy of one or more of these DVDs. View them, then donate them to a science teacher! I know, I know, science teachers could probably order these items themselves BUT the fact is that most science teachers are not hooked into academia and unless they are members of NTSA they probably haven’t heard of this.
At any rate, check these DVDs out!
Scott
I was wondering if PZ was going to up the ante since we were closing in on the $1000 so fast. I would think there are enough visitors here to pass even his new goal of $2000.
The $10K that some of the Seed bloggers are shooting for seems a bit high, but maybe not.
Wow–I attended one of the schools on your list, and so I had to donate, in honour of the coincidence (and of the fact that they don’t seem to have been able to buy many new materials since I was there).
Hey, my donation pushed it over the halfway point! OK, so it was already really close…I’m a grad student!
Anyway, twenty bucks via the “donate to this challenge” button, since they all sounded pretty deserving and I couldn’t choose. Thanks for doing this, PZ, and for drawing attention to needy science classes. I’ll link directly to your challenge on my blogs, if you don’t mind.
Although I’m not one of your beneficiaries, as a public school science teacher I’d like to thank all of you who have donated.
I didn’t know about DonorsChoose program until I saw it here. I’m already thinking of ideas I know wouldn’t be funded by my school.