Room to Read had its humble origins in Nepal, where we began bringing donated books to rural communities. Today, we are a global organization transforming the lives of millions of children through education, creating a world free from illiteracy and gender inequality.
Our History
Documenting Our Milestones in Photos
1998-2000: An Idea is Born
Our trek through Nepal, John Wood visits a school with just a few books for its 450 students. The headmaster says, "Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books." A fortuitous collaboration with Dinesh Shrestha returns John to Nepal with 3,000 books collected from friends and family.
John leaves his position at Microsoft to follow his passion and start Room to Read alongside Co-founders Erin Ganju and Dinesh Shrestha. Room to Read opens its global headquarters in San Francisco
2001-2005: Momentum & Innovation
With programming covering literacy (libraries, school construction and books) and girls' education, Room to Read expands into Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Laos and then Sri Lanka (post 2004 tsunami).
Always entrepreneurial, we dive into book publishing to respond to the lack of local language children's literature where we work. We start our research, monitoring and evaluation efforts to ensure our work is results-oriented and informed by data.
Applying innovation, we launch volunteer chapters across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. to help raise funds and awareness. Room to Read wins our first big grant awards from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and Skoll Foundation.
2006-2009: Thinking Bigger, Bolder
In 2006, Room to Read embarks on its first strategic plan and sets the goal of impacting 10MM children by 2020. We emphasize expansion into new regions and commit to full integrating a monitoring and evaluation discipline into our work.
To meet our bold goals, we launch into Africa, South Africa, Zambia and Tanzania. We expand into Bangladesh and open our first overseas fundraising office in London. In response to our commitment to transparency and constant improvements, Room to Read's first Global Monitoring Report is released in 2008.
Room to Read featured in global media including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Japan Times and The Oprah Winfrey Show. The world starts reading about us via John Wood's memoir, "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children."
Credit: Harpo Productions Inc.
2010-2014: Recognition For Quality
Our next strategic plan, Envisioning our Future: A Roadmap for Learning, focuses us on our outcomes. We consolidate programs into Literacy and Girls' Education, with enhancements such as literacy instruction and life skills for girls. We readjust our goals: reach 10MM children by 2015 (5 years earlier) and become a US$50MM organization by 2015. We reach both goals in 2015.
2015-2019: Scaling Our Impact
First Lady Michelle Obama visits our work in Cambodia as part of her Let Girls Learn initiative. Just a few months later in Cambodia, our staff, board members and donors symbolically celebrate reaching the milestone of 10 million children reached through our programs.
Our most recent strategic plan, Scaling our Impact, focused on deepening and broadening our reach. We stress data-driven results and streamlining and standardizing initiatives within core programming. And we focus internal investments on resource mobilizing and sustaining our workforce to position us for future growth.
To scale further we launched Room to Read Accelerator, a technical assistance unit committed to training governments and like-minded organizations to implement programs like ours.
The future awaits with our next big goal: reach at least 15 million children by 2020.
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