Hey ScienceBlogs readers: you rock!
In a year where lots of folks are waiting for the signs of economic recovery to be manifest in their daily lives, and where public school budgets have been even more hard hit than they were a year ago, your generosity helped us significantly surpass the impact of our October 2008 drive.
Let’s break it down:

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Happy Hallowe’en and welcome to the last day of the 2009 Social Media Challenge. With your help, ScienceBlogs bloggers have raised more than $56,000 to help public school teachers pay for classroom supplies, fund field trips, and support activities to help their students learn.
Today is the end of the drive, so if you’ve been hanging back — or if you’ve found some money in the pocket of that winter coat you’ve just dug out of the closet — this is a great time to help make a difference. And, if you make a donation through my challenge page, you can still get in on some fabulous prizes, including sprog art.

Indeed, here’s some art from the younger Free-Ride offspring to encourage you to give what you can!
(Oh yeah, and since you all helped me raise more than $3,000, I’ll be composing, singing, and posting a philosophy of science song for you. Gulp!)

As I noted earlier this week, Hewlett-Packard is going to be distributing another $200,000 in the DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge. They’re dividing up that pool of money according to how much each challenge has raised as a proportion of the total funds raised by this Sunday. In other words, if my challenge were to raise an amount equivalent to 1% of the total take by Sunday, HP would add another $2000 to fund the projects in my challenge.
If we were to get enough of an extra kick from HP to break $3000, I would gladly deliver the “big reward” I promised to you (and the internets) collectively.

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It’s day 20 of the 2009 Social Media Challenge in which generous ScienceBlogs readers (among others) help raise funds through DonorsChoose for books, supplies, field trips, and other classroom projects in cash-strapped U.S. public schools.
So far, we’ve made impressive progress, with 13 challenges mounted by ScienceBlogs bloggers raising a total of $19,462. You may recall that $650 of that total was donated by Hewlett-Packard, which gave $50 to each of our challenges. I’ve just gotten word from the folks at DonorsChoose that HP wants to kick in even more — with a twist:

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Our month-long drive with DonorsChoose to raise funds for public school classroom projects has been under way for almost two weeks now. At the moment, the ScienceBlogs leaderboard show a total of $15,890 from 121 generous donors, benefiting 6,971 public school students.
That’s pretty good work so far!
Of course, there’s also the matter of how the ScienceBlogs bloggers who have mounted challenges are doing in their competition to demonstrate that their readers are the most generous. So let’s check in on the horse race.

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