Single Donation Fulfills Every Request on DonorsChoose

'We never had this dream because it would have been too crazy to even say'
By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 28, 2018 2:12 PM CDT

The scope of the donation—and the effects it will have on US students—is almost hard to fathom. "I kind of dared myself to send an email pitching an idea 10 times bigger than I've ever pitched before," Charles Best, founder of DonorsChoose.org, tells the San Francisco Chronicle. DonorsChoose.org is a fundraising site where teachers can request money to fulfill classroom needs, from computers and musical instruments to field trips and more. On Tuesday's Late Show, Stephen Colbert announced every single funding request on DonorsChoose.org had been filled. That's over 35,600 requests from over 28,200 public school teachers, KOKH reports. All told, it comes to $29 million in funding.

"It's a million students and teachers who are getting books, art supplies, field trips, robotics kits," Best tells CBS Boston. The generous donation comes from Ripple, a startup in San Francisco that created a way to transfer cryptocurrency and owns the biggest share of a cryptocurrency called XRP. It's simultaneously the largest donation in the 18-year history of DonorsChoose.org and the largest ever donation of cryptocurrency. Major donations in the past have filled every request on DonorsChoose.org from a particular city or state—but never every single request on the site. “I would say it’s the dream coming true, except we never had this dream because it would have been too crazy to even say," Best tells the Chronicle. (These donors want their $100 million gift returned.)

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