Over the past three years, the Corporate Social Responsibility sector has blossomed with support for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives — with racial equity campaigns front and center. Thanks to our 23 year history funding teachers’ resource requests and focus on racial equity, DonorsChoose is uniquely positioned to help companies who want to build inclusive, representative classroom environments where teachers and students of color alike can thrive.
The Challenge: Launch The Allstate Foundation’s new racial equity giving pillar through an impactful national campaign
Through the development of their Advance Racial Equity focus, The Allstate Foundation (TAF) sought nonprofit partners who could close the racial opportunity gap for careers with thriving wages. Connecting this area with their existing philanthropic portfolio around Empowering Youth, TAF recognized that combatting the current racial inequities in education is foundational to closing those opportunity gaps later in life.
Inspired by our previous collaboration supporting teachers’ social and emotional learning requests on DonorsChoose, TAF challenged us to build a $1.5 million national campaign that would support teachers of color and help classrooms access diverse and inclusive learning resources.
Our Approach: Two-pronged support to first-time teachers of color and racial justice & representation resources
In addition to tapping into our teacher demographic capabilities, we developed an entirely new subject category to help The Allstate Foundation and other donors support learning resources related to racial equity easily and at scale.
Funding Teachers of Color
Starting in 2019, we invited teachers to optionally share with us demographic information, including their race, gender, and the year they began teaching. Since then, more than a quarter million teachers have shared their information, and nearly 75,000 of them are teachers of color, creating one of the largest databases of teachers of color in the country.
Using this information, we were able to target a portion of TAF’s grant to match individual donations made to projects from first-time teachers of color. In doing so, TAF was able to directly improve the classroom conditions for these teachers of color, while introducing them to our platform for accessing additional classroom resources.
Funding Racial Justice & Representation Resources
When TAF first approached us about supporting projects that bring racially diverse and inclusive learning materials into the classroom, we didn’t have a way to target funding to those projects at scale. Knowing that this desire to support these projects would only grow and was deeply aligned with our equity focus, our team launched a new Racial Justice & Representation project category that teachers can select when creating their projects.
With this new project category, we’ve been able to match donations to racial justice & representation projects with the same accuracy and speed as we can support Math projects.
Impact
In fall 2021, we launched The Allstate Foundation Equity Match Offer, doubling $1.5 million in donations to project requests from teachers of color who’d never before received funding, and teachers of any background requesting projects in the new Racial Justice & Representation project category. In addition to creating this impact on classrooms, this campaign received an honorable mention in PR Daily’s 2022 CSR & Diversity Awards.
Key Impact:
- $3 million total impact ($1.5 million from TAF and $1.5 million from donors)
- 15,000 donors inspired
- 6,637 total projects funded
- 4,567 first time teachers of color funding
“Thank you so much for your contributions. My students love the space for their multicultural library. This year, I am teaching 2 groups of ENL students, a group of 5th graders, and a group of 2nd graders. They both love the multicultural library space and use this space to engage with peers on topics like diversity, inclusion and justice. THANK YOU!”
—Ms. Shaw, Grades 3–5, Syracuse, NY, Building a Multicultural Library with Flex Seating
About The Allstate Foundation
Since 1952, The Allstate Foundation has led national programs, partnered with national organizations and offered grants to local nonprofits to create innovative, long-term solutions for those in need. The Allstate Foundation strives to give people the power to achieve their aspirations by empowering youth to be the next generation of leaders, disrupting the cycle of relationship abuse, advancing racial equity and strengthening nonprofit leadership skills.
About DonorsChoose
DonorsChoose is the leading way to give to public schools. Since 2000, more than 5 million people and partners have contributed $1 billion to support 2 million teacher requests for classroom resources and experiences. As the most trusted crowdfunding platform for teachers, donors, and district administrators alike, DonorsChoose vets each request, ships the funded resources directly to the classroom, and provides thank yous and reporting to donors and school leaders.
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