Back in 2007, Beth Schmidt was a Teach for America corp member teaching English class to 165 10th graders in South Central Los Angeles. She was still pretty green, which may explain why, early in the semester, she assigned her kids a research paper on migrant workers, an assignment destined to fail in a classroom where students were largely disengaged and bored. And fail it did. Out of 165 students, about 10 percent actually turned in the paper.

So Schmidt changed her strategy. For their next paper, each student was instructed to write about a personal passion, then research a summer program in the Los Angeles area related to that passion. Nearly all of them turned in a paper.

"There was this big transition from apathy to this very distinct excitement, and it got them writing," Schmidt recalls.

Motivated by this success, Schmidt ran a marathon, through which she raised $12,000, enough to send seven students to the program of their choice. The kids were different when they returned. "It felt like a total 180," she says. "They were more confident. And they had this broader vision of what could be possible for their lives."

Schmidt wanted to turn this experiment into a full-time gig, and in 2012 launched Wishbone.org, a non-profit crowdfunding platform that helps low-income students get the money they need to attend elite summer programs. To date, Wishbone has helped send 378 students to summer programs, amounting to more than $1 million in funding.