Touching lives

How to put this gently? John Wood is making the rest of us look bad. Oh, he doesn't mean to.

The founder and CEO of a San Francisco-based non-profit organisation called Room to Read, who's just published a book called Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, doesn't blame us for not quitting our nice, secure jobs pushing paper or marketing digital widgets, as he did seven years ago at age 35, and throwing ourselves into planet-enhancing philanthropy.

He knows few people have the ability or the desire to drop everything else in life for a chosen cause — in Wood's case, sending millions of books to village children in places such as Nepal, Sri Lanka and Vietnam; building thousands of libraries and hundreds of schools; and funding more than 2,000 long-term scholarships for education-deprived girls.

He strides through Washington's Union Station, a tall, fit-looking man with a Boy Scouts smile and a salesman's focus.

He's in town, he explains, to help expand the network of folks "who can't quit their day jobs, who didn't get the lucky break with the stock options package" — but who want at least a bit part in the world-changing dream he's living.

Fantasy lives come at a price, of course.Wood has paid it.
But to hear the emotion in his voice, as he recalls the reception he got while delivering his first shipment of books to Nepal, is to think: He got himself a pretty good deal.

He went to college at the University of Colorado, got an MBA at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, did a stint in commercial banking. Then he got recruited by Microsoft.

Longest vacation

Flash forward almost a decade. Wood had driven himself hard. He loved exploring new places and had volunteered repeatedly for international assignments.

Now he was rewarding himself with his longest vacation since joining Bill Gates's mega-corporation: three weeks of trekking in the Himalayas.

On the first day out, he struck up a conversation with a Nepalese man who turned out to be the "resource person" for 17 rural schools.

The man told him he really didn't have any resources to offer and Nepal had a 70 per cent illiteracy rate.

The next day, they toured a village school. It had a room labelled "School Library", but there were no books in sight.

Where were they?

Locked up, Wood was told. The random volumes that the school had were considered so precious, he writes, "that the teachers did not want to risk the children damaging them."

"Perhaps, sir," the headmaster suggested, "you will someday come back with books."

From a cyber cafe in Kathmandu, he fired off an e-mail asking everyone in his online address book to send donations of books in care of his parents.

Thousands arrived. Wood flew home to help sort them. Then he and his dad embarked on a father-son bonding trip for the ages.

Accompanying a book-laden donkey train to the Nepalese village, they walked through a human corridor of grateful children.

What happened next can be shorthanded as a fairy-tale ending: Having discovered his true calling, Wood quit Microsoft, founded Room to Read and never looked back.

When he launched Room to Read he threw himself totally into the effort.

He figured he had enough saved to work for free for a long time — but when the tech bubble burst, his $2 million worth of Microsoft stock lost nearly half its value. He discovered he could buy a house in San Francisco or do Room to Read. He's still renting.

At the time Wood started doing that thing, according to UN reports, an estimated 850 million of the world's people lacked basic literacy.

He puts Room to Read's efforts in statistical context. "We've reached, so far, 800,000 kids," he says, calculating the children benefiting from the organisation's library — and school-building programmes.

By Room to Read's 20th anniversary in 2020, he hopes that number will be eight million.

The Room to Read website notes more than 120 million children of primary school age are not in school.

Eight million would be less than 7 per cent of them. But nothing can undercut Wood's optimism.

His entrepreneurial worldview appealed to funders from the high-tech world, among them big-time venture capitalists William Draper of Draper Richards and Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, who provided crucial seed grants.

Evangelist

Wood has the same attributes venture capitalists look for in for-profit entrepreneurs, says Valentine: He's "an evangelist" with the "passion and personal charisma" to sell others.

One way Room to Read differentiates itself is its focus on educating girls.

Early on Wood decided to offer long-term scholarships so girls who otherwise might have to drop out can keep studying.

He explains this decision on a number of levels. There's basic justice: Two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women. There's large-scale pragmatism: "How can you have a big effect? Get the girls in school, because they pass on knowledge to the next generation."

So far, the organisation has concentrated on Asian countries, but Africa is next: There are plans to go into South Africa, Zambia, Ethiopia and probably Mozambique. Latin America likely will follow.