In prior years, this community has participated in the Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge during the month of October. We've won the Bloggers Challenge in the tech category three years in a row with total giving amounts of about $30,000 each year. We were dominant in the tech category and a few other blogs were equally dominant in their categories. As a result Donors Choose has decided to stop doing the Bloggers Challenge and encourage the blog communities that were regular winners to do something on their own.
What we are going to do here at AVC is make November our Donors Choose Month. We are going to try to raise a bunch of money for Donors Choose projects this coming month. In that respect it will be a lot like prior years. However, there are two important twists (one borrowed from last year).
The first twist is that we are going to focus on science and math education for young women. We've curated a giving page for this community and we've filled it with projects that focus on science and math and young women. I have kicked off a month of giving with $250 of contributions to five projects. Here are the five that I selected:
Our Giving Page is full of projects like this and we will keep it filled with them for the entire month. I am excited to be doing something real and tangible for young women to get them prepared for the world we live in. I hope you all are too.
The second twist, borrowed from last year, is that we are doing a Meetup on December 8th from 6pm to 8pm in NYC. The Meetup will happen in a public school in NYC. I will be there and I hope the Gotham Gal will be as well. We will have a number of NYC public school teachers and a few people from Donors Choose as well. Anyone who participates in this month of giving and contributes via our Giving Page will be invited to attend.
So that's what we are doing this coming month. I'm excited about this new way of doing this. The competition with other blog communities was getting boring because we beat them so badly three years in a row. Now we can make this all about our community and the projects we are supporting. We will launch a giving widget for this effort on the right sidebar sometime in the next couple days. Until then, go to the Giving Page and get started.
