Room to Read

Several years after ago meeting John Wood at a fundraiser and learning about his remarkable story, we exchanged a few emails and I briefly explored the possibility of working for his organization.  Ultimately, the job went to a far more qualified candidate than me.

I'm glad to see Room to Read is stronger than ever. 

From the NYT...

One of the legendary triumphs of philanthropy was Andrew Carnegie’s construction of more than 2,500 libraries around the world. It’s renowned as a stimulus to learning that can never be matched — except that, numerically, it has already been surpassed several times over by an American man you’ve probably never heard of.  

I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.  

Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie...