Donors

It takes courage and real commitment to do this kind of work. I appreciate your efforts in helping to keep the struggle alive and to ensure the River of Freedom keeps flowing. Thank you for your service!

As a higher education administrator, I am donating to the Zinn Education Project because I believe that educating children early about people’s history is one of the best — if not most necessary — things we can do to turn the tide of ignorance, apathy, and colonialism in this country.

Young people need to learn the people’s history so they can be leaders for the social change we all so desperately need.

Right now, the world can seem a hopeless place. But there is hope if our teachers share true stories of the power of collective action. I didn’t get to hear that story until I read A People’s History of the United States in college. I don’t want our children to be 20 before they get the chance. That’s why I support the Zinn Education Project.

The need for this project could not be more timely. Social change is only possible if people understand their history and they are willing to question. Reading Howard Zinn’s books and attending his lectures when I was in college greatly influenced and provided me with the perspective and understanding to pursue a career as an attorney representing whistleblowers. I sincerely hope that others who have been inspired by Howard Zinn will give what they can to this project so you are able to reach many, many more teachers and students in the coming year.

Whenever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was there, on the front lines, unflagging in his enthusiasm, and inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and insight; a light touch of humor in the face of adversity, and dedication to non-violence and sheer decency.

It is hard even to imagine how many young people’s lives were touched, and how deeply, by his achievements, both in his work and his life.

I’m donating to support the great work you do in providing resources to teachers and others to help tell the full story of the history of the United States. I’m a retired college professor who made use of your resources in teaching U.S. history.

It’s been a real privilege for me to work with the ZEP team and to see how teachers and people all across the country are informed and transformed by this invaluable resource. ZEP has a small staff and a very large reach. All their resources and people’s history curricula are free, so they truly depend on donations to continue the work they are doing and to be able to broaden their reach and create new programs.

I urge you to join me in supporting the essential work that ZEP is doing to ensure that young people understand the full history of their country—learning from the voices and experiences of ordinary people engaged in struggles and movements that have contributed to creating positive change and furthering social justice.

As my father said: “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

(Read more.)

As an immigrant from Germany who lived in the United States for thirty years, I know how the truth of a story comes through the richness of diverse voices. My own work teaching mindfulness, yoga, and other awareness practices that are somewhat outside the mainstream of traditional education makes the work of the Zinn Education Project even more meaningful to me.

I care deeply about educating and empowering young people so they can contribute to creating a more just, democratic and inclusive society. It is this kind of authentic education we should all support.

I am donating because the Zinn Education Project shares stories of courage, resolve, and hope that I don’t get from any other source.

We contribute to the Zinn Education Project because it is a powerful way to help teachers and students learn a more complete, nuanced, and inclusive history of our nation.

Many of the social, economic, and even political problems that we face today are rooted in our country’s racial caste system. We can’t begin to think responsibly about how to solve these problems if we don’t understand how they were created. The Zinn Education Project attempts to bring that understanding of our racial history to middle and high school students, and for that we are all in the project’s debt.

I have been teaching history in high schools and college for 50 years, and I have used Zinn’s work for most of the last 40. His revolutionary perspective has touched students and woken them up to sides of the American story that they had never imagined. The Zinn Education Project’s work is critical to developing an informed public better prepared to be responsible citizens.

I had the genuine pleasure of personally meeting Howard Zinn when he came to speak at Rhode Island College around 2000. His example has taught me so much  as both a teacher and an historian. Thanks to you and everyone at ZEP for their unrelenting efforts to inform students and help develop critical thinking skills so essential in a world of competing stories of our past.

I was introduced to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in the 12th grade by my AP Government educator. She instilled a passion for politics and social justice that I never really sat back and understood; until now, a decade later. I hope this donation assists other students across the country learn a more complete and inclusive history than that’s found in their textbooks.

It’s important now more than ever for young people to understand and learn more about lives that are not included in a standard curriculum, and give voices to those who are silenced. I hope this helps students gain an awareness of differing perspectives, inspires them to become passionate about change, and drives them to take action. We cannot be neutral on a moving train.

This gift is in honor of the 69th birthday of my father, Larry Jones, retired high school U.S. History teacher.

A People’s History of the United States was required reading from literally day one in his classes. Dad had first learned about A People’s History from a review in The Nation in the mid 1980’s and first obtained his copy from the Stolen Continents History section at City Lights Bookstore during a Summer 1986 trip to San Francisco. He spent his career keeping the curriculum laser-focused on the people’s history and the struggles for dignity and justice.

I use Zinn Education Project resources regularly as well as recommend them to colleagues because of the way they center resistance and agency in helping students learn full, complex, accurate history. Thank you for all you do to provide quality resources for teachers and students!

I can’t even begin to name all the ways I use the Zinn Education Project.  My own teaching is mostly university students so I don’t often use the lesson plans directly but I pull historical data from them and I suggest them to anyone I meet interested in learning or teaching a more inclusive U.S. history. Your emails and social media presence keeps me alert to key historical currents that are powerful and significant but also terribly under the radar in our nation today.  Some I know of and am happy to be reminded about, but many times I learn of these episodes from you.

When I was studying U.S. history in grad school, I drew inspiration from Howard Zinn’s writings — & I still do!  So when I discovered this project that moves his vision forward,  I was excited,  and have remained a fan of ZEP ever since. As the biographer of white anti-racist activist and journalist Anne Braden and as someone who co-founded a university institute named after her that educates on the Black freedom movement and especially local and under-known stories from it, I also share some of our resources with ZEP.  And I often point local educators to your work when they approach us for ideas.

Your work is all the more important amid the rising tide of white supremacy the past few years have brought, and they will be all the more essential as our nation’s history curriculum necessarily transforms in creative, positive ways in response to the reckoning that the Black Lives Matter movement is propelling for us all. The work of the Zinn Education Project is helping to usher in that needed transformation. Thank you!

Thanks for helping me get through my first year of teaching with engaging social justice lesson plans!