Ann Ness, a veteran marketer who helped build Cargill’s brand, will be crowdfunding for classrooms as the new executive director of AdoptAClassroom.org, a nonprofit organization in Minneapolis that helps teachers nationwide raise money for supplies.
Many teachers spend hundreds of dollars of their own money on their classroom. AdoptAClassroom.org is just one of several online platforms that helps individual teachers solicit donations. It has raised $28 million since it was founded in 1998 by local attorney James Rosenberg, who saw the need while volunteering at a school. Teachers receive 100 percent of money given online, which they can use to shop in AdoptAClassroom.org’s online marketplace of several-dozen vendors. Supplies are delivered to the school.
Ness most recently was vice president of marketing at St. Paul’s Hamline University and before that worked as vice president of corporate brand management and advertising at Cargill and director of advertising and brand management for Radisson Hotels Worldwide.
Adoptaclassroom.org had revenue of nearly $3 million in 2015, according to its most recent tax forms. Its expenses were about $1 million (covered by investment income and donations not designated for classrooms). It sent just over $2 million to more than 8,600 classrooms around the country.
More than 1,200 teachers in Minnesota are asking for money on the site, including a 10th-grade math teacher at Harding High School in St. Paul who wants to buy graphing calculators for students who can’t afford them, and a science teacher at Farnsworth Elementary in St. Paul who wants equipment to project pages of their science notebooks onto a big screen at the front of the class.
“Part of the beauty of AdoptAClassroom.org is its straightforward, uncomplicated mission,” Ness said in a press release. “Our nation’s teachers need and deserve our support.”