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We’re proud to bring you the good news that our very own Charles Best, leader and founder of DonorsChoose.org, is currently featured in The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” forum. Charles weighed in with his philanthropic suggestions for Goldman Sachs, which announced this week that it was starting a $500 million charitable project to help 10,000 small businesses.

Charles’s commentary appears alongside the opinions of Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, authors of Philanthrocapitalism – who we posted a blog about last week – in addition to Robert Johnson, Nicole Gelinas, Naomi Prins, and Peter Firestein.

Nearly 9 years ago Goldman Sachs made an investment in DonorsChoose.org that provided the funds we used to build our website. Having once been in a similar position to the 10,000 potential small business recipients, albeit on the nonprofit side, Charles offered some advice to help Goldman Sachs succeed in its philanthropic effort: 1) determined people “can do very smart things with small sums of money,” and 2) Goldman Sachs should consider crowd-sourcing to choose the 10,000 beneficiaries. As we at DonorsChoose.org know well, when thousands of people weigh in collectively on decisions, both big and small, the best results usually emerge.

Check out exactly what Charles had to say here.