New fundraising challenges arise for Stanford Spokes as Stanford Digital Education closes doors

Following the budget cuts to Stanford Digital Education (SDE), which has disseminated Stanford’s education benefits to low-income students worldwide since 2021, Stanford Spokes lost its system for obtaining donations from University departments. Under the mentorship of the 2025 Stanford Spokes team, the 2026 team is working to navigate this new fundraising landscape and its challenges.  

Each year since 2017, Spokes has given a team of six to seven select Stanford students the opportunity to spend their summer cycling from San Francisco to Washington D.C., teaching fun and educational workshops in under-resourced areas along the way. In past years, teams have worked with SDE to raise funds for vehicles, educational supplies and other materials. This year, students must fundraise on their own. 

SDE previously aided fundraising efforts by serving as an intermediary for donations from Stanford departments such as Stanford Medical School and the Bill Lane Center for the American West, according to Puja Chopade ’27, who participated in Spokes last summer. This structure allowed departments to donate without giving money or resources directly to students. 

The Daily has reached out to the University for comment on plans to support Spokes. 

“We imagine that without SDE, it’ll be a lot harder for them to have that credible way of collecting funds from Stanford departments, which was a pretty big chunk of the money that we raised in total,” Chopade said. 

Sasha Balasingam ’27, another member of the 2025 team, hopes that this year’s team can find different Stanford offices or organizations through which Stanford departments can donate to Spokes. However, Matthew Sullivan ’28, who also participated in Spokes in 2025, expects that the 2026 team will need to focus more on donors outside the University. 

“Every single year, Spokes gets more and more connections and more and more support from a wider community,” Sullivan said. For example, last year’s team received a significant donation from Young Guru Academy, an organization dedicated to helping students complete impact-driven projects. 

Sullivan encouraged the Spokes 2026 team to utilize the Spokes alumni network for donations as well. Last year, Sullivan created a chart of every student who has participated in Spokes. 

“We didn’t end up needing to go down that tree, but this year’s team will probably have to, so I’m excited to be able to pass that forward,” Sullivan said. 

Sullivan expects that alumni will be excited to support the program. “When I’m 30, Spokes is going to be something I would very much want to contribute to to make sure that everybody gets that experience because it was a monumental experience for me,” he said.

Although the 2026 team only met for the first time this past week, they already have ambitious plans to tackle the fundraising challenges they face, according to Jack Flynn ’28, who will participate in Spokes this upcoming summer.

“We have this plan to become a 501(c)(3), like a [tax-exempt, public interest] non-profit, and then to try to get tax deductible donations from people that way,” Flynn said. Additionally, they plan to reach out to the list of alumni that Sullivan compiled.

The Spokes 2025 team is prepared to support the 2026 participants in the absence of SDE. They similarly had to outsource and seek new connections, when they learned they would not be able to use an athletic van from the University to transport their supplies across the country as past years had, according to Balasingam. Still, the lack of assistance from SDE presented an unprecedented obstacle. 

“This is something new that we’re not super familiar with, but we’re going to help them as much as we can,” Balasingam said. 

Although fundraising for Spokes will look different this year, Chopade, who called her team “some of the most resilient and creative people I’ve ever met” believes that the Spokes 2026 team will be able to overcome these challenges. 

“I’m optimistic that this team is going to be okay,” Sullivan agreed. 

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