Nothing can ever be free. Donations don't lead to good products, companies do. You can learn how to grow chestnuts in your backyard instead of buying them from the supermarkets. But you still buy them because its hard to grow a tree. It is someone else's business. You're a high school teacher.

We need people that have their incentives aligned to work hard and provide us great solutions. Donations misalign incentives.

For example, say chestnuts are grown by a farmer who gets donations from a kind wealthy man. The farmer's incentives would no longer be to grow good chestnuts but to please the wealthy man. But the wealthy man doesn't eat chestnuts. The market does, the market would have carefully selected the good chestnuts forcing the farmer to do that. An ideal market of course not a twisted one.