Edutopia - February/March 2008 - (Page 40) One man’s simple plan to expand worldwide literacy, thousands of libraries at a time. room to read BY SARA BERNARD hen John Wood, an executive at Microsoft, visited a local school in Bahundanda, Nepal, in 1998, he saw something odd: a room labeled “Library” in which no books were visible. It turned out they were locked in a cabinet—all twenty of them—to prevent damage at the hands of the cashstrapped school’s 450 students. Not long afterward, Wood left Microsoft to found Books for Nepal, which raidly developed into Room to Read, an international literacy nonprofit organization that builds bilingual libraries, schools, and computer labs in developing countries. The foundation also collects donations of Englishlanguage books, publishes local-language books, and creates long-term scholarships for girls. Since its inception in 2000, Room to Read has established programs in Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Zambia; the organization plans for branches in Latin America in 2008. “I feel there’s a moral obligation to reach out and do a lot more for kids in these parts of the world who have never had access to books or libraries or teachers,” says Wood, who has taken his dream from an initial donkey-load of donated books to an organization that has built thousands of libraries and hundreds of schools (a story told in his memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children). “You don’t get do-overs with education,” he adds. “If we don’t reach the five-year-olds today, next year or next decade is simply too late.” W More Bang for the Buck Room to Read keeps administrative overhead low, so almost every dollar raised goes directly to its in-country projects. But the exponential growth of the organization, Wood says, is mostly due to the international community of Room to Read’s volunteers who donate their time and money to the cause. Students are especially generous with their time and effort. Students Helping Students, one of the foundation’s most successful programs, began in 2004, when three ambitious preteens launched a fund-raiser for students and schools in tsunami-stricken Sri Lanka. Sales of $3 wristbands, plus student-run events, earned an impressive $400,000 for the country’s rebuilding efforts. Now, Students Helping Students is a growing movement that encourages students around the world to take action in their communities, organize fund-raisers at their schools, and learn about the inequities of a world where access to education—or even to something as fundamental as books—is not a given. “It’s important for students not only to learn about what’s going on in the world but also to gain a sense that they really can make a difference,” says program manager Molly Redding, a champion of the approach central to both Students Helping Students and Room to Read—social entrepreneurship. The idea that business skills can be used to create positive social change has helped recruit young “social entrepreneurs” who have launched charity balls, book drives, auc- 40 EDUTOPIA FEBRUARY/MARCH 2008
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