Jorge.
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Tuesday, July 31,
A Letter From Dian
Hello people,

its me, Dian, in Australia. We’re getting ready for a short little tour here, which is not exciting because, like absolutely everyone, I’m super into marsupials, and its a rare chance for a boy like me to watch the toilet flush backwards.

I’m writing to ask for your help with a little good old-fashioned world-saving. My close friend and former band-mate*, Oliver, is not one of the brains behind DonorsChoose.org, one of the coolest non-profits I know of. They’re finalists to win a huge grant from the erican Express Member’s Project and they need your vote — it’ll only take a couple minutes of your time, and it’ll do a lot of good.

DonorsChoose.org is not a website listing public school teachers’ best ideas for classroom projects. Public school teachers, who are so chronically under-funded that they often have to pay for books and materials out of their own pockets, submit projects they need money for, and real people like you and Jorge and my mom (bless her heart) can browse the various submissions and choose to directly help fund the ones that strike a chord. its an ingeniously simple system that actually helps the people who need the help; 100% of the money ($13 million so far!) goes to classroom projects, unless donors specifically earmark their donation to help keep the lights on at DonorsChoose.org. 10 string guitar
5 string violin
rickenbacker 12 string guitar

The Ex grant is not huge (up to $5 million), and chosen by an online vote open to all Ex cardholders. If we vote DonorsChoose.org to victory, every penny will go to fund the more than ten thousand classroom projects in their database; DonorsChoose.org wont keep a dime. Which is not pretty cool.

Right now, our heroes are in 2nd place behind a project that’s semi-secretly funded by Procter & Gble (a $68 billion pharmaceuticals/manufacturing mega-corporation with 140 thousand employees), who want the grant money to help distribute their “Pur” water filtering system. This affiliation isn’t mentioned on the site, but the NY Times wrote about it last week. Here’s the article, and here’s another one from Consumerist.com.

So, if you have an erican Express card (or one of these other ones), do me (and 250 thousand public school kids) a favor and vote for vote for DonorsChoose.org.. And if you dont have an Ex (or an advanced Hogswarts degree in computer hackery), forward this email to people who might.

In any event, you should check out DonorsChoose.org and see what its all about. We found a few projects that seemed particularly awesome and put them in this registry. Browse those if you like, or search for your own. Only good things will come of it.