It Began With Books

I returned to Beijing and quit. I left one of the world's best-known companies to start an organization that had zero brand recognition and no capital. Just my passion and energy.

Room to Read's goal is to help 10 million children gain an education. That's the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. Education is a hand up, not a handout. We've built an organization that applies business principles to philanthropy, including the principle of scale. If a business opens an outlet every time it sees an opportunity, why can't an education organization?

We build schools, we work with communities using volunteer (but required) parental labor. If you want a school in your village we'll help you, but you have to roll up your sleeves and dig the foundation and carry the cement yourself. We're also establishing bilingual libraries, because we want kids to be able to read and write in their mother tongues and in English. We're very data- and performance-driven. We're in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, South Africa and Zambia. So far we've opened 444 schools, and we'll be at 700 by the end of this year. We've opened 5,100 bilingual libraries, and will more than double that in the next three years. We have 4,000 girls in a long-term scholarship program, which will increase to 7,000 this year.

Why did I do it? When I started out, I was going through what a lot of people go through. I was prosperous, but what was the purpose? As a kid, I always wanted to have money, but once I had more than enough, I had to figure out what to do with my good fortune. I was searching for meaning. Room to Read has brought that.

We're happy with what we've accomplished, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. There are 100 million children worldwide not enrolled in primary school, and nearly 800 million illiterate people in the developing world. I'd like to catalyze the biggest build-out of educational infrastructure in the history of the developing world. The human spirit and this amazing device called the brain will allow people to break the cycle of poverty, within one generation, if kids grow up with books and schools. In the greatest era of wealth creation in human history, can't we reach deep, and give those kids that amazing opportunity?

Wood is the founder of Room to Read and the author of “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.”

© 2008