Kids Learn to be Philanthropists with Charity Checks

The Giving Classrooms program seeks to inspire the next generation of philanthropists.

If you were a kid and someone gave you $25 to spend on whatever you'd like, would you splurge on candy and toys or would you use the money to try to make the world a better place?

Through a unique program called Charity Checks, hundreds of children have been able to turn their dollars into good deeds — and learn about the value of philanthropy in the process.

"Give the Joy of Giving"

Charity Checks, the brainchild of founders Victor Dorff and Lisa Sonne, works kind of like when you make a charitable donation in someone's name, but it brings that second person all the way into the donation process. First, you buy a giving certificate from Charity Checks, and it comes to you with the payee line blank. You give the certificate to someone as a gift, and they choose any nonprofit they want to receive the donation (from more than 850,000 IRS-approved organizations). You get the tax deduction, the charity gets the money, and the person you gave the certificate to gets the satisfaction of knowing that the money went to a cause that matters to them.

Dorff and Sonne created Charity Checks around the idea of "giving the joy of giving." Businesses embraced Charity Checks right away as a way to reward employees, but the couple felt that its real impact would be in the classroom teaching kids about the value of giving, a concept they call "Charitable Literacy." Dorff explains: "We both felt that Charitable Literacy could make an important contribution in training the next generation of philanthropists."

Giving Classrooms

Just as charity begins at home, Charitable Literacy begins in the classroom, specifically in what they call Giving Classrooms. At schools across the country, teachers use Charity Checks as a learning tool for their entire classes. Students learn about giving, and in the process they also learn how to research charities, communicate issues, raise money and many other skills related to their schoolwork.

"The Charitably Literacy program is very easy for teachers to use because it embeds lessons on philanthropy into core subjects," says Dorff.

Julia Mason, a third-grade teacher at Wonderland Elementary in North Hollywood, Calif., has been using Charity Checks as a teaching tool for six years. "Our kids learn how to look at an organization's website," she says, so they can research what a charity is all about. The students learn to write business letters, and speakers from many local charities come to speak to the class.

"One of our subjects is the local community," says Mason, "so we focused a lot on local charities. Our school is right outside of Hollywood, so our kids are exposed to a lot of homelessness, drugs and alcohol issues, hunger and the like. The kids like to know that they're helping these issues by raising money for them. They like to be involved."

The kids in Mason's class just finished their annual Lemon Aid for Charity lemonade sale, netting $945. "The kids are through the roof," she reports. Each of them will now get a Charity Checks certificate to give to one of the local charities they heard about over the course of the year.

"It was awesome," says Harvey Roberts, one of the kids in Mason's class, who is donating his Charity Check to LA Family Housing, a local charity that helps transition families out of homelessness.

Fun for Kids of All Ages

Giving Classrooms take on many different formats depending on the schools and the ages of the kids. Eighth-grade teacher Terry Baris of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles uses Charity Checks in her public speaking program. The students raise money through student-council fundraisers, like selling tickets to dances, which then gets split up into four $50 checks for each of her of her public speaking classes. The students each choose a cause, research it, and then make persuasive speeches about each of them. After all of the speeches have been made, the students vote for the organizations they most want to support.

"It made the speeches real," says Baris. "It was real money, going to real organizations."

This year's charities included Best Friends Animals Society, the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust, Livestrong and nearly a dozen other nonprofits.

"I think it's really empowering for the students," says Baris. "The kids had a chance to do real good in the world."

Baris' curriculum, like that of Mason and several other teachers, is available on the Charity Checks website to be shared with other teachers.

The Echo Effect

Although now self-sustaining, with the kids raising their own money each year, the programs at both Harvard-Westlake and Wonderland Elementary were both originally funded by Bruce Miller, a parent whose kids went to the schools several years ago. "I saw an article about Charity Checks about six years ago and thought it was such a neat idea," he says. "I've been involved ever since."

Miller praises Charity Checks for what he calls its "echo" effect. "You're not just helping the charity, but the children who learn the value of philanthropy and hopefully become lifelong givers," he says. "It's a very nice upward spiral when you deal with Charity Checks."

Photos courtesy of Charity Checks.