New Room To Read Chapter Started In Salt Lake City
Nov 4th, 2007 | By Kevin | Category: motivation, personalIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Feedburner. Thanks for visiting!
Laura and I attended a lecture Friday night with John Wood, the former Microsoft marketing executive that started the non-profit Room to Read. I first heard about Room to Read through an email I received from Timothy Ferriss from The 4 Hour Work Week fame. He announced to his list a contest marketers and entrepreneurs across the world were participating in. Room to Read has five programs to help developing countries escape poverty through education.
- Building Schools
- Establishing Bi-lingual libraries with donated English books and self published local language books printed with the country.
- Local Language Publishing. As mentioned above, they are helping local author become published creating childrens book in the local languages
- Creating Computer and Language Labs
- Long Term Girls’ Scholarships
The talk John gave was very inspirational and informative as to how to set up a very well engineered non-profit. Since most of the fundraising is done through volunteers, and the local groups working in the country are staffed by locals, 88% of the donations go directly into the programs. I was also impressed with his no Landrover rule. Many of the different aid organizations go into these developing countries to help those in need, but they go out and spend $80,000 on new Landrovers to transport everyone around. Room to Read instead uses whatever local transportation can be arranged to transport the books to the schools and libraries that need them.
Another aspect of the program that helps the sustainability of the program, is the parents of the students receiving the books, libraries and schools take part in the construction as a commitment to their childrens education.
I am currently reading John’s book, Leaving Microsoft to Change The World. I have also added a widget to this blog to help raise money to build a school in Vietnam. If you can afford to donate, please do.
I will be making more posts as I progress through the book. I am also planning to put together a new teleseminar series on Social Entrepreneurship.
For more information about Room To Read and their program please visit: RoomToRead.org
Thanks,
Kevin
Originally from Wisconsin, I moved out to Salt Lake City over ten years ago on a six month software development contract. I now have over 15 years in software development, and was introduced to internet marketing back in 2003. During the wild west days, our business focused on content sites for Adsense revenue. As it became harder and harder to keep up with the search engines, our business has evolved, and forced us to focus on building lists and creating products. We now have a list of about 5000 interested in goal setting, and a small internet marketing list of about 500.