This week I had a great experience with charitable giving thanks to Donors Choose, a charity that gives money through to teachers for classroom needs. Right now is a good time to give with school starting soon. And the way Donors Choose works feels personally meaningful.

The site lets you browse projects that need funding: $115 for classroom organizers for a kindergarten in Louisiana, $70 for planters and seeds for a garden in Oklahoma, $1300 for iPads in Washington DC, or heartbreakingly $239 for fans for kids in juvie without fresh air. The requests vary widely and the schools are all over the US; you can choose what speaks to you most. Or just give some money and let the organization figure out where to send it.

I ended up spending several hours choosing projects a few bucks at a time. I used the map view to focus on poor, rural areas where the parents weren’t going to be able to raise money with a bake sale. Mostly places I had some connection to, rural Texas and New Mexico near where I used to live. Places I used to drive through thinking “thank God I didn’t grow up here, I’d be stuck”. I don’t know that a copy of The Maze Runner is going to make all the difference to help a kid in Gallup, NM access the wider world around him, but if a Teach for America teacher thinks it’d help then that’s probably a good use of $7.

One of the sad but inspirational things I learned looking through the site is that the teachers themselves are often donating. As if taking an oath of poverty to become a teacher isn’t enough. If you’re in an industry that pays well, consider chipping in a few bucks as thanks for whatever teacher gave you the education to get you where you are today.