There was the class of Iowa teenagers seeking supplies for the homeless, and a Texas teacher who wanted $150 in headphones for her elementary school students.
In Illinois, one educator wanted a set of laptops to better prepare her students for middle school, while a teacher in Massachusetts sought $41,000 to stock a library in an elementary school that serves low-income students, many of them refugees.
This week, those requests, along with the more than 35,000 others listed on DonorsChoose.org, a crowdfunding website for school and classroom projects, were fully funded thanks to a single $29 million donation.
“A million students, overwhelmingly in low-income communities, are going to feel the impact of this gift within the next few weeks,” said Charles Best, chief executive of the nonprofit group, which he founded in 2000 while teaching history and English in a Bronx classroom.
Charles Best, founder and chief executive of Donorschoose.org, at a conference in 2014. Mr. Best emailed Ripple’s chief executive with an audacious proposal: What if it fulfilled every request on the website?CreditAlison Yin/Invision for Intuit Quickbooks
The gift, by far the largest ever received by the charity, came after the site reached out to Ripple, a virtual currency company that has amassed wealth at an astonishing pace, and its executives.
“We’re surrounded by people who have benefited from having great educational experiences and we very much recognize that’s not the case across the U.S.,” said Monica Long, the senior vice president of marketing at Ripple, which is based in San Francisco.
“It’s just a subject that we all care very passionately about and we were in a position to make it happen,” she said of the decision to fully fund or top off all outstanding requests for supplies, books, technology, food, equipment, trips and more.
The donation was announced this week by the late-night host Stephen Colbert, who himself helped to fund every project in his home state of South Carolina in 2015.
It will reach at least some classrooms in more than 16,500 public schools, or about 1 in 6 public schools nationwide, according to the charity.
Among them is Marina Del Rey Middle School in Los Angeles. Heather Vibbert, a special-education teacher there, had six requests fulfilled as a result of this week’s donation.
As a result, her students, many of them from low-income households, will benefit from new science DVDs, a Blu-ray player, art supplies and individual white boards, among other things. The highlight, though, will be a Google Expeditions Kit, which will enable them to take virtual field trips.
“I can guide them through the ocean bottom or Mars or any kind of crazy place we can dream of, which I’m very excited about,” Ms. Vibbert said. “That was kind of my big aspirational project that I never thought would get funded, but it never hurts to ask.”
No one understands that better than Mr. Best, who in January reached out to the Ripple chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse, a longtime supporter of the charity, with an audacious proposal: What if the business fulfilled every request on the website?
Mr. Best hesitated to send the email at first, fearing that he might offend Mr. Garlinghouse, but pushed ahead, acknowledging upfront that he was making a “wildly ambitious pitch.”
“I just hope you don’t mind my swinging for the fences,” he wrote.
It paid off. Soon, Ripple invited him to San Francisco to make the case in person and, within about a month of receiving the email, the company had agreed to make the donation.
DonorsChoose.org vets each project posted on the site. Once a funding goal is reached, the charity works with teachers and schools to fulfill the request, rather than simply transferring the money directly to the person who made it.
In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina, 212 projects worth about $130,000 were fulfilled by Ripple’s donation. In Atlanta, it funded about 260 projects, valued at more than $280,000.
The requests can be wide-ranging. Many are for necessities like supplies, clothing or food, but others can help teachers pursue passion projects that schools may not have the resources to support, school administrators said.
“It encourages teachers to be excited about their practice, to test things that we typically would not be able to fund,” said Meria Carstarphen, the superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools.
Most of the donations teachers receive come from outside of their community, allowing instructors in low-income areas to connect with those who have the means to help.
This week’s gift from Ripple not only eclipsed the previous top donation of $9 million, but it also sparked a flurry of activity for DonorsChoose.org.
On Wednesday, 16,000 projects were created on the website, beating its previous weekly record of 15,000 new requests in a single day.
Among them is one from Ms. Vibbert, who hopes to purchase a set of books for her students about the friendship between Alexander Hamilton and his sister-in-law Peggy Schuyler.
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