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« Pushing the Non-Profit Design Boundary | Accomplishments Over Activities »
September 29, 2006
Room to Read
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Featured Nonprofit
A three week vacation from Microsoft changed John Wood's life--and impacted nearly one million children. In 1998 Wood planned a three-week trip to Nepal trekking across the Himalayas. But on the first day he struck up a conversation with a local who was in charge of resources for 17 schools and had nothing to work with. Nepal had a 70% illiteracy rate. Wood shot an e-mail back to the U.S. asking for books and his vacation turned into something else.
In 2000 Wood left Microsoft and founded Room to Read, a nonprofit organization that wants to break the poverty cycle by bringing education and literacy to the world's poorest children. They open libraries and schools, publish local language books, donate English language books, and offer long-term scholarships to girls--all with an entrepreneurial approach that requires locals to put forth half the effort for a project. So far Room to Read has impacted the lives of nearly one million children, constructed almost 200 schools and founded nearly 3,000 libraries.
Wood has contributed his own story to his crusade to help children read, the book Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children.
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