WITH EARLY SUCCESSES LIKE THE CHICAGO EVENT, IT WAS APPARENT that we had potential to seriously expand the number of fund-raising chapters around the world. My vision was to create a powerful network of volunteers, who would, collectively, raise millions of dollars. Ideally Room to Read could raise money wherever there were wealthy people, from Austin to Boston to Vancouver.
It would be a relatively new way of creating large-scale social change. In the old days, large-scale philanthropy was practiced only by the rich. If one wanted to change the world, it helped to have a large fortune. A man like John D. Rockefeller could take on numerous infectious diseases. Brahmin families in New En gland would start universities. My own personal hero, Andrew Carnegie, could visualize a network of 2,000 libraries and actually have the financial might to fund all of them. One man, one swipe of a pen across a check—that was the way things were done in the corridors of power, wealth, and privilege.
There are, however, a few problems with this model. First, there simply are not enough billionaires out there to solve all of the world’s problems. True change requires mass participation, because one person writing a large check is never enough. He could change his mind about the cause, or make bad investment decisions that deplete his capital, or die and leave his money to his heirs rather than to charity. To rely on just one person is quite risky, especially when the future of millions of people is at stake.
The larger problem is that too many of the truly rich are loath to give away their fortune in any meaningful way. We live in a world where the megarich think nothing of spending $50–100 million on a yacht, complete with helicopter landing pad. They forget the Talmudic principle that “there are no pockets in the burial shroud,” and upon their death half of their fortune goes to the government (which will likely squander it), and the other half goes to his or her heirs (who hopefully won’t, but then again many of them do).
From the beginning of Room to Read’s existence, I have thought that hoping for billionaires to solve the world’s problems is like waiting for Godot. It’s also the surest way to perpetuate the status quo. I greatly respect men like Carnegie in his day for building libraries, and modern philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates for taking on so many “overlooked” diseases that kill millions. I just wish there were more of them.
But my bias is not toward dreaming; it’s about doing. When I set out to establish at least as many libraries in the developing world as Carnegie did in North America, I was well aware of my limited, and declining, bank balance. It was therefore necessary to update the model and enlist an army of volunteers. One cold and foggy San Francisco night, curled up in a large reading chair in front of a blazing fire, I pulled out my journal to brainstorm on how to raise the funding we’d need. The opening thought that popped into my head was simple, clear, and would provide direction over the coming years:
The Andrew Carnegie of the 21st century will not be a rich white male. It will be a network of concerned global citizens, and we will create it.
None of us could, alone, accomplish what Carnegie had. But together, with the power of dozens (and eventually hundreds, then thousands) of high-energy people working together, we knew that it was possible to think even bigger than Carnegie had.
ONE OF THE FIRST “NODES” IN THE NETWORK I SET OUT TO BUILD WAS A Chicago-based entrepreneur named Michael Lindenmayer. He had attended one of our first slide shows. Afterward during the social hour he pulled me aside to compliment our work and to say that he had a myriad of ideas for how he could help us to reach our audacious goals. He had been involved early on in Grameen Bank, and what he said was music to my ears.
“A decade ago, few people had heard of, or understood, micro-credit. But today millions of people knew how much good it could do to lend small amounts of money to help people start businesses, and how income from those micro-enterprises could help to lift people out of poverty. Most importantly, the model recognized that the poor are capable of helping themselves and could earn their way into self-sufficiency instead of relying on the traditional model of aid.”
In Michael’s view, Room to Read circa 2001 was no different from Grameen Bank circa 1991.
“Both organizations are doing something that in the early days is considered difficult and a bit revolutionary. But one day it will be ‘obvious,’ and people will wish that they had thought of your idea first. Both organizations have brilliant and dynamic leaders who can make a persuasive case for their cause.* And both organizations expect the people they help to be willing to also help themselves. You both demand the best out of human nature—the willingness to think long term, to invest for the future, and to use one’s brain-power. This is just so different from traditional notions of aid, which ‘give charity’ rather than ‘invest in people.’ The main reason Grameen was able to expand its awareness was that they were brilliant at energizing volunteers around the world to help them make the case for microfinance. I’d like to help you do the same with Room to Read.”
Never one to refuse an offer of assistance from a bright person, I immediately booked time with Michael during my next swing through Chicago.
TWO WEEKS LATER, ON A BRILLIANT, CRISP SPRING DAY THAT MAKES A Cubs fan’s thoughts turn to opening day at Wrigley Field, Michael and I grabbed a coffee at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore just off Michigan Avenue. As we have done dozens of times since that day, we both began talking at a mile a minute.
I started by explaining my overall goals. Even though we were proud of having set up 500 school libraries, I felt as if I were still in the first mile of a marathon. The organization was only two years old. There were whole regions of Asia in which we had no presence, including poor countries near and dear to my heart like Burma and Bhutan. Of all the countries in Africa, we were in zero. On America’s doorstep, we had neighbors like Haiti and El Salvador with perpetually high poverty and a shocking lack of educational opportunities for their children:
“I love what Carnegie did, but the weakness of his model is that he only thought about one country. The need for education, and children’s love of reading, are both forces that are universal. Did you know that in Niger, eight out of ten children do not get past fifth grade? That seventy percent of women in Ethiopia cannot read? I think of my friend Vu, in Vietnam, and how little it took, resource-wise, to help him to complete his education. I had the easy part—I just had to find him some money. All the hard work was done by him—working long hours at the hotel, sacrificing his sleep, and all for the love of learning.
“So then I visualize all the Vu’s who live in India and South Africa and dozens of other countries. I’d like to help all of those kids, and I don’t want to be limited in my thinking, either in geographic scope, or in terms of having a huge goal. Why is it not possible to set up five thousand, or ten thousand, or twenty thousand schools and libraries? We know that there are at least that many villages that need help. The biggest missing ingredients are building out our team and of course attracting the capital that will be needed to fund this many projects. That’s where the network comes in.”
Michael succinctly concluded, “Okay, you need capital. Let’s talk about where we are going to find it. Let’s make a list of the richest cities—let’s go where the money is. What we will need to do is find the people in each of those cities who know how to get things done, make things happen. Not everyone in the world wants to ‘pull a John Wood’ and quit their job to go save the world. But there are thousands, maybe millions, of people who are making good money and want something more from life than career success. They’re the people Thomas Friedman refers to as super-empowered individuals. They will be willing to give this cause some of their time. Rather than ten more of you, we need a few thousand people who can each devote a few hours a week. We’ll tie them all together into a fund-raising network that will be so powerful that your teams overseas can double, and then double again, the number of projects they can take on. Okay, let’s make a list of the cities where we need to build these chapters of zealots.”
New York was obvious. All those billions on Wall Street—maybe we could redeploy a small percent of it to the developing world. Boston was obviously a target, as was Washington, D.C. Michael had lived for years in London and thought we should start a chapter there. I replied that two of our first in-country volunteers were a British couple, Frances and Douglas, who were passionately devoted to Nepal. We would unite Michael’s friends with mine.
Too excited to not begin acting immediately, I pulled out my laptop and began firing off e-mails: first to Frances and Douglas, then to Scott, my old friend from Microsoft Australia who was now working for the company in Hong Kong. Next I wrote to Jason, a PR exec who had recently moved from Silicon Valley to Singapore.
Michael, meanwhile, was on his cell phone with an old friend in Atlanta, and by the end of the call Raj had agreed to start our first Southeastern chapter. Our table at Barnes & Noble resembled an international airport, with flights (of fancy) taking off at supersonic speeds in all directions. By the time we had finished our brainstorm, I felt exhausted and jet-lagged, but also exhilarated by the bold vision we had formulated and embraced. In my notebook, I wrote down the proclamation we had made, which was simple, but potentially world-changing: everywhere on the globe where there are people with money, Room to Read would be pitching them to help fund our goal of universal education.
There was just one risk, but it could bring our fantasy crashing down—would people respond and offer to take part in our vision? After all, we were asking people who held down demanding jobs to carve out scarce hours to devote to a new and unproven cause.
THE RESPONSE, FROM NEW YORK AT LEAST, WAS IMMEDIATE. MY PHONE rang the next day, and I heard the enthused voice of my friend Nancy. We were old friends from Sydney, and she had recently moved back to her native New York. As I walked through the bustling United terminal at O’Hare with one finger jammed into my ear to block out the loud boarding announcements, Nancy machine-gun-blasted me with a torrent of ideas for starting a New York chapter:
“Give me some dates that you can be out here and I’ll throw you a fund-raising party. I’ll host it at my apartment so that we don’t have to pay for a venue, and I will cover the costs like sushi and beer. My place can only hold fifty people, but that’s all right, it will be cozy like a Nepali teahouse on a cold night. Put me in touch with any friends you have here, and we’ll get them involved and invite their networks. We’ll tell people at the event that there are only two calls to action: donate, or help us to build a chapter. Preferably both.
“I have only one request, though, and, John, you’re not going to like it.”
“Yes?”
“You know how much I loved living in India, right? You also know how desperately that country needs programs like your library initiative and your fund for girls’ scholarships. You have to promise me that you’ll consider expanding Room to Read to India. I know you had a bad experience traveling there because you are a wimp who hates crowds, and who can’t deal with heat or constant haggling. Put that aside. Get over it. The country needs you.”
I promised that I would consider her offer, despite the unprovoked commentary on my weaknesses. But my brain was weighted down with the thought of taking on yet another country. We could barely keep up with our existing slate of projects. I was continuing to help our anemic cash flow by not taking a salary, and with Microsoft stock having dropped from $40 a share to $22, half of my savings had disappeared. Boarding the plane, I suddenly realized that within Nancy lay both the challenge and the solution. The challenge was to continue to expand our educational programs into new countries. The solution to our funding problems was to build out this network of fund-raising volunteers. I told her that this only upped the pressure on her to deliver a successful party.
Five days later, I fumbled for the ringing phone in my backpack and nearly fell off my bike. It was a cool morning in the Presidio, with the scent of recently departed fog. From 3,000 miles away, I could hear Nancy, calling as usual from the dog-walk pen at her Upper East Side park. In between yelling at Nathan the Wonder Mutt to stop harassing the other dogs, she gave me an update:
“Hey, can you stay in New York for an extra night? We already have eighty RSVPs, and my place can only hold fifty people. So I’m thinking about adding a second ‘spillover’ night. We can still use my place, refresh the sushi supply, and serve the leftover drinks. It’s better than turning people away. So many people have called me and told me their travel stories. You know, the same thing you and I have experienced, being in a magical and remote place and loving it, but also being appalled by the poverty. The Room to Read solution really resonates. I think we’ll have a good crowd. Or two of them. And they will donate.
“Oh, yeah, and my father called this morning. He’s going to show up with a $1,000 check from our family foundation. But just to warn you—he asked me to tell you that his strong preference is that the money be spent in India.”
THE NETWORK OF ROOM TO READ CHAPTERS GREW AT AN EVEN FASTER pace than Michael and I had visualized. By the end of 2002, we had active fund-raising teams in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle, and embryonic teams starting up in a few other cities. Although most of the chapters were being started by old friends of mine who wanted to support the organization’s ambitious goals, each of them was also proving savvy at recruiting additional volunteers and leaders. In New York, as an example, I was surprised upon walking into Nancy’s first event to be introduced to the “host committee” of five women. Each had traveled in the developing world and been touched by the poverty and lack of opportunities for children. I asked one of them, a media executive named Jen, what motivated her to get involved.
“This is an easy cause to get behind. The result of what you do is so tangible. Nancy told me that if we raise $8,000, you can build a school, and that if we raise $10,000, that would mean a school plus a library. The causal link between what gets donated and what gets built is really compelling. I’ve volunteered for other organizations and have never really known where the money goes. So when Nancy told me about this, and that we might even be able to travel to Vietnam or Nepal to visit the school, I was hooked. And when I told my parents, my father gave me a check for $2,000. He got off easy, as he could give much more than that, but when I pressed him for more, he said I was the one getting off easy as I was already one-quarter of the way to a school. He told me to quit while I was ahead and count him in for the same amount next year.”
She continued, “Look, New York can sometimes be a cynical place. People can come up with all kinds of reasons to not give. You have hit on something that will cut through that negativity. So this event will be a huge success. Everyone who will be here tonight has had a great education, be it college or grad school. Every one of them will understand that this is a powerful model. How often in life can you go to a cocktail party, have fun while meeting great people, and fund a school or two in the process? That direct correlation between what we give, and what gets done, makes me think we’re going to do really well.”
Jen’s prophecy proved correct, not only in New York, but in other cities as well. Our two nights of events at Nancy’s apartment netted over $20,000. Our Bay Area team planned an event that in one night underwrote over 100 years of girls’ scholarships. A strong team was being built in Chicago under the leadership of an enthusiastic lawyer. Tina Sciabica had just returned from a trip to Asia and had read an article about Room to Read in the Chicago Tribune. “I knew immediately that this was my cause,” she told me upon our initial meeting. “Once I read that you are doing scholarships for girls, that’s all I could talk to my clients about. I decided that I might as well raise money for you. My business will probably suffer a bit since I am so focused on Room to Read right now, but I want to see you go from one hundred girls on scholarship to one thousand.”
NOT EVERY FUND-RAISING EVENT WENT AS WELL AS WE’D HOPED. INDEED, a few of them were such failures that I found myself going back and forth on whether this chapter structure was worth the investment of my time and energy.
In the spring of 2002, a woman who was planning to start a Room to Read chapter in Boston called to ask if I could fly out to present at their initial fund-raising event. I knew that the city was full of young people, and old money. This seemed a potent combination. I therefore rationalized the $900 round-trip fare on American, the only airline then flying the SFO-to-Boston route nonstop.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but not so good when the alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. There are days when I wish I could simply drive ten minutes to work and punch the clock rather than dashing to the airport for a 6 a.m. flight. This would be one of them.
I arrived at SFO on time. American Airlines did not return the favor. They had canceled the early-morning nonstop to Boston. As a poor substitute, they gave me an itinerary that would have me cooling my heels for two hours, then catching a flight to Dallas, where I would have some more dead airport time before connecting with a Boston flight. I’d arrive four hours later than planned. So much for paying a premium to fly nonstop.
After a long day in transit, I was not in the best of moods upon arrival at Boston’s overcrowded and run-down Logan Airport. Things only got worse as I waited outside in the exhaust-enhanced afternoon heat of the airport’s pickup area. Our new chapter leader had insisted on picking me up, and I now regretted not sticking to my original plan of the ten-minute cab ride into the city. Repeated calls to her cell phone went unanswered. After a half hour of frustration, I decided to brave the taxi queue.
Building a team of volunteers requires a founder to take many leaps of faith. Some work out brilliantly. Others leave you wondering. As I schlepped my bags toward the cab stand, my phone rang. Our new chapter leader was “only” ten minutes away, and so again I went into wait mode.
She finally arrives. I hop into the car and eagerly throw out questions about the next night’s fund-raiser.
She quickly corrects me.
“Well, it’s not exactly a fund-raiser.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t that why I am here?”
“I think of it as more of an ‘awareness raiser.’ We need to get people first to know about your cause, and then later, maybe in a year, we can ask them for financial support.”
At this point I want to say that one can’t pay salaries or buy bricks using “awareness.” It is not a universally accepted currency. I bite my tongue. I don’t know this person well enough to be a smart-ass. Yet.
Instead, I make the case for requesting at least a small amount of money. I don’t get very far.
“I’m willing to ask people to pay $10 at the door, but will also tell them that if they can’t afford it, then that’s okay too.”
“How many people are you expecting? And can’t most people afford $10? I mean, if we have the right demographic…”
She ignores the latter question and answers the former.
“Probably 40–50.”
“I thought you told me on the phone last week that you were expecting 125–150.”
“That was my goal, but I did not really have time to publicize your speech.”
In my head I do the math. Even if we hit fifty, and even if all of them give (despite our basically inviting them not to) we’ll only cover half the cost of my flight. The CPA working his adding machine in my head is interrupted.
“Of course, I’ll need to use some of that take at the door to cover the catering costs. Those ran about $400.”
Ugh! I wish I were home in bed. I wish I were anywhere besides here. Have I really just flown cross country to attend an event that was going to have no cost of admittance, free food and drink, and no call to action asking people to donate? This is no way to run a railroad! I had made several leaps of faith in building out the chapter structure, and apparently this one had been a leap into the abyss.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON I TOOK A LONG RUN ALONG THE CHARLES RIVER. As eight-man crews whizzed by with each rower in perfect unison, and the Hancock Building shimmered in the afternoon sun, I convinced myself that regardless of the event’s bad economics I should simply have fun with it and drop my obsession with revenue. Heck, maybe I’d meet some fun people and have a good time.
An hour later, I was testing my presentation on the floor-to-ceiling screen at the Swiss House, the Cambridge-located liaison office of the government of Switzerland. I had no idea why they were hosting us, but was too busy playing with all the whizzy high-tech gadgets to spend time worrying about it. Our Yak Mobile, delivering books to kids in the mountains of Nepal, had never looked cooler than on this twelve-foot screen. I was excited to start the slide show and tell the crowd about our work.
As fifty to sixty people ate cheese and crackers and sipped char-donnay from plastic tumblers, I projected images of children devouring books in our new libraries in Nepal, toddlers in Vietnam attending our new kindergartens, and our newest group of scholarship girls. It felt that I had nailed the presentation. Yet at the end not a single person clapped. Odd. Our work had always drawn vocal and positive feedback.
Staring out at a sea of skeptical faces, I paused, wondering what was going on. I filled the void by asking if anyone had questions.
“Yes, I have one.” A young woman in horn-rimmed glasses, short-cropped hair, and a blue Patagonia fleece threw me a zinger. “Can you explain your pedagogical theory?”
Ped-a-gog-i-cal theory. Do I have one? “Uh, sure. Kids need to grow up learning, reading, and going to school, and in the developing world a lot of them currently don’t. We help to fill that void with new schools, teachers, libraries and books.”
She pointed out that this was not really a unified pedagogical theory. I could not argue with her on this one. I made a mental note to ask someone smarter than me whether Room to Read had a UPT.
I changed the subject by calling on a young kid who looked like the quintessential “smart kid in the first row,” the one who spent all of third grade being the fastest to have his hand in the air.
“How can you guarantee that these kids will have jobs when they finish school?”
“Quite honestly, I can’t. Then again, neither could my parents when they sent me to school. The goal of our programs is not to guarantee a job. Our raison d’être”—maybe a French phrase could impress this hypersmart crowd—“is to give children opportunities that they would not have otherwise had. To develop their brains from a young age. To become lifelong learners. To have better health. To pass on knowledge to the next generation.”
“So,” he said in his best Perry Mason voice, “what you are saying is that you can’t guar-an-tee that your students will have jobs.” With that, he tossed me his best frown.
Time for me to make another deflection. I called on a 30-ish woman who was almost raising the roof as she thrust her hand in the air.
“It says in your bio that you went to MBA school. How can you do this work without having a Ph.D. in education?”
Could this trip possibly get any worse? I felt as though we had invited the Harvard Debating Society, the MIT Curmudgeon Club, and the Cambridge Chapter of Youth United in Skepticism to our event. I wanted to scream from the stage, “Look, people, I don’t have all the answers. I am simply trying to do what little I can.”
Question time was abruptly curtailed by administrative fiat of the CEO. Demoralized, I packed up my notebook computer. A few of the event’s attendees came up to tell me that they really liked Room to Read’s projects and invited me out for a beer.
We found a small pub and chatted over a highlight reel of ’80s music. A Coloradan named Pam, who had recently moved to Boston, told me that she felt badly about the Q&A session. “This is the problem with Cambridge. So many people here have gone to elite schools all their lives and have several advanced degrees. They are eager to prove that they are smarter than everyone else in the room. Your host let you down. Rather than treating this as a fund-raising event, she let it degenerate into an academic debating society.”
I told Pam that the crowd had brought to mind one of my favorite Chinese proverbs:
“Those who say it cannot be done should not criticize those who are doing it.”
She laughed and clinked glasses. “Come back this fall. I’ll rally some friends who aren’t afraid to ask people to give money. I met a great woman tonight named Jen who wants to get involved. We’ll throw you a real event. All checkbook, no curmudgeon.”
DESPITE THE SETBACKS, I KNEW THAT WE WERE ONTO SOMETHING BIG with the chapter model. Not everyone could quit his or her job to try to change the world, as I had. However, millions of white-collar professionals were contemplating how they could focus some of their talent and energy on the social sector. My in-box was living proof of this. Every time our work was featured in Fast Company, Forbes, or Time, hundreds of people would e-mail me with a derivation of the simple question “How can I help?”
With so much progress happening in the United States, we made the internationalization of our network a main focus for 2003. London was first. My cell phone rang one blustery morning in New York as I was dashing to catch a subway to meet with a foundation that donated millions of dollars to education projects in India. Dean Chan introduced himself succinctly and got straight to the point. He was a fellow Kellogg graduate who had read an article in our alumni magazine about Room to Read’s progress. He saw serious fund-raising potential in Great Britain and was ready and willing to set up Room to Read as a public charity.
Dean laid out the business case. The country had over 60 million people and one of the strongest economies and incomes per capita in the world. The average citizen was well aware of the global condition, partly as a result of the glory days of the British Empire. There was a strong history of citizens donating to causes beyond the borders.
I agreed that the British market was tempting, but asked whether it wouldn’t be logistically and bureaucratically complex to set up a charitable entity. Dean replied that he had already contacted the charity commission, studied the application process, and believed it was possible to get set up in less than two months. Besides, his business was consulting. He was good at dealing with complexity and process.
I was impressed that he had already done his homework, rather than calling me with a pie-in-the-sky idea that had not been thought through. I asked next about his motivation for wanting to get involved with Room to Read. He explained that education had made a big difference in his life, and now that he was a successful adult he wanted to devote some part of his energy to helping others to gain that same advantage.
As I descended the steps to catch the no. 9 train, I shouted above the din that he had my approval to get started with the process. I suggested that we talk again in a week to iron out the logistical details.
He asked if I could come to London to speak at his first fund-raising event. Yes, yes, count me in. The train was approaching and I needed to catch this one if I was to avoid being hopelessly late for the foundation meeting. But was I really agreeing, in an initial five-minute “nice to meet you” phone call, to start up a UK chapter, and to fly over there for a total stranger? Isn’t that the same mistake I had made in Boston?
Something in my gut trusted Dean. He seemed genuine, smart, and focused. The Kellogg connection was there. We needed capital and the Brits had quite a lot of it. The pound was a strong currency. This felt right. Dean said he would “ring off” so that I could catch my train and offered a “Cheerio.” As I rushed past the closing doors, I marveled that our pace of growth would continue to accelerate if we opened Room to Read up to the millions of globally minded individuals outside the United States.
Two weeks later I had a surprisingly similar phone call from Vancouver. Anja Haman, like Dean, was a consultant, and she had read a Fast Company story on Room to Read. She was motivated to start a Canadian arm. She explained that she wanted to have a “service hobby” to go alongside her obsession with ultimate Frisbee.
“Why Room to Read?” I asked.
“The organization has a way of motivating people who are looking to do more with their lives. You reach a certain level of business success and you realize that this is not enough. You start to look for something more meaningful. This is the best thing I’ve found, and I have been searching for a long time.”
I asked why Canada would be a good market.
In an extremely high-energy and rapid burst she overwhelmed me with her sales pitch:
“Vancouver is the most international city in Canada. We have very deep ties to Asia; over thirty percent of citizens here are originally from there. Every year I throw myself a birthday party, and a few hundred people show up. This year I’d like for the party to be not about me, but instead have it benefit kids who need education. I could do the party as a one-off event, but the businessperson in me thinks that this could be much bigger and more sustainable if we set up some structure around it. I’m thinking about a Canadian board of directors, getting tax status so that donations are deductible, and having an annual event that grows and grows in both number of attendees and money raised. This could become one of the best parties in Vancouver. I’ve already talked to a bunch of artist friends, and all of them are willing to create pieces that we can auction at the first event. And I’ve found a perfect venue. I know I should have waited to talk to you first, but once I read the article, I got so excited that I got to work immediately. I’m the kind of person who does things and then asks for permission later!”
Like Dean, she had already done her homework and estimated that it would cost about $1,000 to set ourselves up as a Canadian charity. She could get it done in a month. She then gave me her unique version of a challenge grant—she’d pay for half the incorporation costs if I’d fund the other half. I liked her closing skills and continued the negotiation with my own counteroffer. We had an event in San Francisco in two weeks’ time. Could she fly down for it, meet the team, and give us the opportunity to get to know her better? She agreed. I offered up my guest room and promised to send a $500 check.
Before hanging up, she extracted a promise that I’d come to Vancouver to speak at her first event. I visualized a one-way round-the-world ticket connecting all of our new international chapters, in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vancouver. My old travel schedule as a Microsoft exec was going to look wimpy in comparison to what lay ahead.
FROM SEATTLE TO THE HIMALAYAS (SEE BOX), FROM HONG KONG TO New York, our network of fund-raising volunteers and chapters was working like a well-oiled machine. It amazed me that I could walk into a small cocktail party in a distant city like Chicago or London and see over 100 people who were passionate about our cause. I believed in Room to Read, of course, but to see so many other people who had made a conscious decision to spend a night of their life hearing about our work meant a lot to me. It gave me faith, during the early years, that maybe we were onto something and that we’d succeed in building a mass movement. The early results were promising, but they were only a slim indication of what lay ahead.
EVERYDAY HEROES: FUND-RAISING ON MOUNT EVEREST
Not every fund-raising event took place in a major city like Vancouver, New York, or London. In the spring of 2002, one of our volunteers threw an impromptu fund-raising event at a base camp at Mount Everest.
An amazing group of women had decided to form the first all-American women’s Everest expedition. It had been less than thirty years since the first woman had reached the summit of Everest, and less than fifteen since the first American woman had. This group of five women decided that they wanted to show the world what a group of American women could do when they put their minds to it.
My friend Alison Levine was serving as the team captain. I wanted to ask her if she would be willing to use the expedition as a “platform” to raise money to build schools in Nepal, but was cognizant of her already insane schedule. In addition to working full-time at Goldman Sachs, she was also trying to raise $250,000 in corporate sponsorship for the climb, and undergoing rigorous physical training to prepare for several weeks at high altitude. In addition, she was attempting to raise $100,000 to endow a cancer research grant at the V Foundation, named after the legendary North Carolina State basketball coach Jim Valvano. Any one of those things could have been a full-time job on its own. Since she was, in effect, holding down all four of these roles simultaneously, I decided that I should focus on being her running and snowshoeing partner and hold off on asking what she could do for Room to Read.
One day, during a trail run in the beautiful hills of Marin County, Alison asked me what was new at work. I told her that we had recently approved four new school construction projects, and that my challenge for the next month was to find donors willing to sponsor them.
“I’ll find two of them,” she said in midstride.
“How are you going to do that, given everything else you have going on?”
“I have no idea. But I’ll find a way. I always do. I want some part of this climb to be about helping Nepal, rather than just attaining the top of the mountain.”
That’s the kind of amazing person Alison is. She had a million reasons not to take on an additional task in the frantic lead-up to her Everest ascent. But she does not like saying no. Yes leaves a much more positive ring in her ears. It’s the reason she had already reached the summit of mountains like Alaska’s Denali and Antarctica’s Mount Vinson.
Two days later, my cell phone rang.
“Hey, it’s Alison. I’m so excited. I just found a sponsor who agreed to fund both the schools I adopted: 85 Broads said they’d do it.”
“Eighty-five who?”
“85 Broads. It’s a group of female employees and alumni of Goldman Sachs. Goldman is headquartered at 85 Broad Street in New York, so they call the group 85 Broads. Cute, huh? Anyway, 85 Broads is run by the most amazing woman named Janet Hanson, and when I told her about the climb and my goal of funding two schools in Nepal, she immediately agreed to fund them. She’s sending you a check tomorrow. And then an hour later this flower guy comes to my desk with a huge bouquet of flowers, and I am wondering who the heck they’re from because my dating life is a disaster, and they’re from Janet. The card wishes me luck on Everest. And I’m thinking that it’s supposed to be me sending her flowers.”
I loved life. Two more schools. Two more villages we could say yes to. And another amazing example of members of our network doing everything in their power to help Room to Read get more schools built.
I congratulated Alison.
“Wait, hold on, there’s more. She wants you and me to come to the 85 Broads annual dinner and present our story. They don’t usually allow men to attend, but they’re going to make an exception for you. There will be at least two hundred people there.”
“Wow! You, me, and two hundred female investment bankers. Karma exists!”
“Good one. Gotta run. Bye.”
As is usual with Alison, the conversation had lasted for less than thirty seconds. Lots of info, lots of good news, all downloaded quickly. Therein lay at least some of the secret as to how she was simultaneously holding down the equivalent of four full-time jobs.
Two months later, Alison was at Everest base camp. During a long period of waiting for the weather to clear, she was visiting another climbing team’s mess tent. A Swiss-Italian climber, Bruno Rodi, was suffering from bronchitis and was bemoaning that he had not gotten higher on the mountain than camp two.
“All my life it’s been my dream to climb Everest. And I didn’t get to the top.”
Alison tried to change his mind-set.
“Bruno, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter whether or not you tag the top of Everest. What matters is whether you do something to help the people of Nepal. Look around you, and what do you see? Crushing poverty, and one of the poorest countries on this earth. You should do what I did and find a way to endow some schools. Even if I never leave base camp, I’ll still be happy that there is a positive legacy from this trip.”
A few hours later, half a world away, and 17,600 feet closer to sea level, an e-mail arrived in my in-box.
From: Bruno Rodi
To: John Wood
Re: New Schools in Nepal
Hello, John:
This is Bruno Rodi, writing to you from the only e-mail account at Everest Base Camp. It is not possible to send large messages from here. We are using very old equipment, hooked to a satellite. So this will be short. I met Alison. I want to be like her and endow two schools in Nepal. Please send to me wiring in structions for your bank. I will then tell my office in Switzerland to donate the money to Room to Read.
Thank you, John, for the work that you do. From what little I have seen of Nepal, it is needed. I will be in touch when I am back down from the mountain.
I read the mail several times and tried to convince myself that it was not a hoax.
A week later, the money miraculously hit our account. The information flow started in Nepal, came to San Francisco, went back to Nepal, then to his office in Switzerland, and then back to San Francisco. And soon we’d be wiring the money over to our account in Nepal to get the schools started, closing the circle. The bits of information traveled over 35,000 miles. Within a month this data stream would be turned into bricks, mortar, chalkboards, and desks. It was one of those moments that made me thankful for technology, in addition to the amazing worldwide network of volunteers who were every bit as passionate about Room to Read as the founder.
* I was flattered by this comparison, as Muhammad Yunus was one of my heroes.