John Wood Turns the Page

Wood set off on a whirlwind backpacking trip and began searching for the "second act" of his adult life. He didn't expect to find it so quickly. Two days into an 18-day trek along the popular Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, he struck up a conversation with a schoolteacher and was invited to visit a local school in a village that was a two-day walk from the nearest road. He was shocked by what he saw. "They gave me a tour of the 'library,' and it was just this big empty room," he recalls. "I looked around and didn't see any books, and I said, without being obnoxious, 'This is a great library, but where exactly are the books?' "

It turns out that the books -- all 20 or so of them, castoffs from backpackers -- were locked up in a cabinet. "The school was worried that the kids would damage them. The irony of that never escaped me."

At the urging of the school, Wood left that day with a homework assignment: Get more books. Back in Kathmandu, he sent an email to 100 or so friends and colleagues. He described his experience and asked them to ship books to his parents' home in Colorado. Within a month, more than 3,000 books had arrived (Wood's father had to move his car out of the garage to make room). "I wish I had saved that original email," Wood says wistfully, "because it turned out to be a seminal moment in my life. When I hit the 'send' button on that message, I put into play something that ended up being so much bigger than I ever thought it would be."

But Wood didn't reinvent himself immediately. Shortly after returning from his trek, he received an offer he couldn't refuse and rejoined Microsoft, this time in China. He continued his work in Nepal, expanding beyond books to building schools. Then, in the summer of 1999, he made his third trip to Nepal. And at the first of two school-opening ceremonies there, he realized that it was time to turn his extracurricular activities into a full-time pursuit. "I loved my job," Wood says. "I thought Microsoft was a great company, and I loved working there. But seeing those new schools and seeing the pride of the villagers -- it was one of the most amazing moments in my life."

He returned home and left Microsoft for good.

All Heart, All Business
At one level, a day for John Wood at Room to Read is a lot like a day at Microsoft. He works hard: 12-hour days and weekends at the office are not uncommon. His schedule is packed with speaking engagements and meetings. He spends several hours a day on email.

At another level, Wood's world looks very different. His desk is a beat-up banquet table. His wall art is a map of Vietnam with pins -- blue for schools, yellow for language labs, green for computer labs -- showing where Room to Read has made its mark. His notepad is a red rice-paper journal that he bought at a women's cooperative in Kathmandu.

This blend of the hard-charging world of Microsoft and the gentler work of social change runs throughout Room to Read. For example, Wood is a fanatic about minimizing costs. Until this year, overhead was less than 5% of total donations. Even now, as Room to Read ramps up for growth, overhead will account for less than 10% of total donations.

Amazingly, despite Wood's big plans and impressive results, the group's paid headquarters staff is exactly one: Erin Keown, who had co-led efforts to build a school while based in Unilever's office in Ho Chi Minh City. Keown, who moved to San Francisco as part of the dotcom wave, is the organization's executive director. (As founder and president, Wood collects no salary.) Keown is responsible for grant writing and fund-raising efforts, overseeing volunteers, and monitoring how schools and libraries get used once they have been built. "We want to go back to schools in six months and see handprints all over the books," she says.

There's another critical part of the Room to Read formula: maintaining high expectations for the beneficiaries. It takes $5,000 in outside contributions to build a school in Nepal -- surprisingly little for a successful American executive but an unimaginable fortune for a typical villager in Nepal, who survives on less than $1 a day. But Room to Read "challenges" villages to pay for half of the project before it will begin work. The village has to raise money from its residents or contribute labor and building materials. In many cases, the process of meeting the "challenge grant" takes longer than the process of building the school. But Room to Read believes that it's worth the wait. "It's about ownership," says Keown. "The challenge grants are as much about creating an educational infrastructure as they are about initiating social change."