Origins of TrueGift

TrueGift Blog

by Charles Merriam

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A TrueGift Experiment: Proactive Distribution

Summary: I called up schools and dropped of a car full of supplies in about six hours. It worked.

Original TrueGift Goals:
TrueGift Donations chased unusual ideals when conceived about a decade ago:
1. Be Efficient With Overhead! No paid employees; no offices; no advertising. Also, no giving money to other charities. We wanted an existence proof of low overhead charities.
2. Be Efficient With Money! We learned to purchase school supplies for far below list price. We deliver instead of mail where possible.
3. Be Efficient With Effort! Value volunteers' time. Make our contribution better than writing an equivalent check.

Over the last few years, we seem to have increased our overhead, purchased more expensive and custom supplies, and spent a lot of our time managing this process. I decided to try an experiment in gong back to our roots.

Phase I: Picking the Schools (45 minutes)
I had lunch plans that would take me past East Palo Alto on Monday. The Friday before, I looked went to GreatSchools and selected the East Palo Alto elementary schools. These had low ratings (1 or 2 on a scale of 10) and insanely high percentages of students on school lunch programs. I made a short signup sheet that asked only for teachers’ names and grade levels and how many crayons, colored pencils, scissors, gluesticks, and notebooks they wanted. I called each school to explain I would be by on Monday with supplies, emailed the sign-up sheets, and printed out maps of where to go.

Phase II: Getting Supplies to the First Classroom (60 minutes)
I loaded up the car with supplies, just tossing in boxes of supplies from my garage. I tossed in some pencils, markers, and rulers for the two teachers that had signed up on the website. It wasn’t too efficient, and I had grabbed a couple boxes of filler paper instead of notebooks by accident. I hoped in the car, stopped for coffee, and drove to the first two schools. They had munged up the sign-up sheets, forgetting to print them and not having teachers fill-them out. I explained that I’d be back in the afternoon. The next school had four classrooms signed up; two on the website and two from the sign-up sheet.

Phase III: Dropping Off Supplies (150 minutes)
At the Edison Brentwood Academy I dropped off:
Maria Ruiz: 20 boxes of colored pencils, 20 boxes of markers, 10 dozen pencils, 20 rulers.
Katia Haesslein: 30 glue sticks, 25 boxes of colored pencils
Nancy Lee: 50 glue sticks, 25 boxes of colored pencils, 70 notesbooks, and 25 pairs of scissors.
Carla Polk: 20 boxes of crayons, 40 glue sticks, 20 boxes of colored pencils, 20 notebooks

This worked pretty well and the supplies seem to have been in pretty short supply. I dumped a large plastic bin of gluesticks onto my front seat and used the bin to assemble and deliver each teacher’s supplies. In Ms. Lee’s class, she took the opportunity for each child to line up, introduce themselves, and accept a pair of pencils and box of colored pencils. It’s hard for third graders to speak to strangers.

I ran off to lunch, and got back to Palo Alto about 2 p.m.

At the Costano School I dropped off 9 classrooms worth of supplies to the K-3 classrooms. The prinicipal had done the initial fill-out for all the teachers, and each teacher confirmed what they really wanted. For example, one kindergarten class needed more notebooks and no scissors. There were six classrooms for fourth grade and above that I skipped. They probably wanted a list with more filler paper, rulers, and pens. Besides, I ran out of notebooks and had promised to drop by the first school. It was fun dropping off supplies, and the teachers were having expending more effort to control the kids in the later afternoon.

Costano received: 207 boxes of crayons, 258 gluesticks, 89 boxes of colored pencils, 270 notebooks, and 226 pairs of scissors.

Cesear Chavez School still had no sign-up sheet, and it turned out they were grades 4 to 7 anyway. I’ll bring appropriate supplies them next time.

Green Oaks, which had munged the sign-up sheet on Friday, did a great job of asking each teacher. As the last stop of the day, the teachers were already leaving or gone. I ended up dropping an enormous pile in the office with each box having one teacher’s supplies and a name on sheet of paper. The K and 1st grade teachers got what they wanted except notebooks. As the grade levels went up, I started running out of everything. Just as well: I was using the empty cardboard boxes of supplies to pack for each new teacher. One fourth grade teacher came up and asked for filler paper, so I gave her one of the cases I had accidently loaded in the trunk. This may have been more efficient than dropping off directly to the classrooms, but it was less fun.

They ended up with a huge pile of motley boxes full of supplies: 173 boxes of crayons, 358 gluesticks, 153 boxes of colored pencils, no notebooks, 226 pairs of scissors (again!), and 36 packages of filler paper.

Then I went home, with a couple scattered gluesticks in the front seat and one large box of scissors left.

Phase IV: Accounting for it (60 minutes)
Ah, the least fun part of the exercise. This write-up, a spreadsheet, and, I expect some data massaging on the we site.

Grand Total:
5 1/2 hours of time
3 schools, 31 classrooms
Supplies with guesses at prices
400 boxes of 24 crayons ($56), 736 gluesticks ($67), 332 boxes of 10 colored pencils ($179), 360 70 page notebooks ($54), 497 pairs of scissors ($238), 45 rulers ($12), 10 dozen pencils ($6), 45 packages of 10 colored markers ($24), 36 packages of 150 sheets filler paper ($19).

So, I gave away about $650 in supplies and it took about 5 1/2 hours. The only real overhead costs was about a dollar of my business cards and mileage. A good experiment, and I will run it again.