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Posted: 2:44 PM- It was an unplanned detour from a Himalayan trail that led John Wood off the corporate track to chart new territory in the world of philanthropy.

Wood was on a trekking vacation in 1998 from his work as a marketing executive with Microsoft when he befriended a Nepalese man who invited him to a remote village to visit a school. Crossing a frightening foot bridge over the Marsyendi River, they reached Bahundanda, where Wood was impressed with the motivation of the school's 400 pupils, but dismayed with its sorry lack of resources.

"I was shocked kids would be asked to learn in these conditions, in schools with sheet-metal roofs that leaked when it rains and dirt floors that turned to mud,'" said Wood.

In a padlocked cabinet were the school's library stacks, about 20 volumes in all. A sampling revealed the books as castoffs from trekkers: A steamy romance novel, a Lonely Planet guidebook and the classic, but impenetrable James Joyce novel Finnegan's Wake, all fine reading, but useless in a school for young Nepalese.

"Perhaps, sir, you will some day come back with books," the schoolmaster said as Wood departed.

These words redirected the course of Wood's life. Returning to work, he solicited contacts over the Internet for donated material and he went back to Bahundanda with his 72-year-old father and eight donkeys. On board were 3,000 donated children's books, English-language titles peopled with familiar characters like Clifford the Big Red Dog, Sam I Am and the Lorax.

Nepal's illiteracy rate of 70 percent virtually locks the nation into its status as one of the world's poorest. In the face of such great need, Wood's gesture was little more than symbolic. What Nepalese pupils really needed, Wood concluded, were books in their local tongue and places to read them.

So he did what few of us ever do: abandon a secure career to follow his heart. In 2000 Wood founded a philanthropic enterprise called Room to Read, based in San Francisco, which has raised $42 million to date and has established nearly 4,000 libraries and distributed millions of books. The organization's goal is to provide educational infrastructure for 10 million kids by 2020 by running its operations like a high-growth start-up business.

"It's a bold goal, it's an audacious goal. It is, however, an achievable goal," Wood said at a presentation Friday night at the Salt Lake City Library to launch a Room to Read chapter in Utah. "Around the world, 110 million kids between the ages of 5 and 11 wake up every morning and don't go to school. If you give them education you change their lives forever."

Since its founding, Room to Read has touched more than 1 million children in some of the poorest Asian nations and is pursuing work in South Africa and South America. Last year, Wood published an acclaimed memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An entrepreneur's odyssey to educate the world's children. The book caught the attention of two Utah entrepreneurs, who were particularly moved by Room to Read's scholarship program for girls.

"When you educate the boy, you just educate the boy. When you educate the girl you help educate her family and community," said Nigel Duncan, an investment advisor helping to launch Room to Read's Utah chapter. Bradford Richardson, an executive with Usana Health Sciences whose family includes adopted children from Asia, is another principle behind the new chapter.

"Education is the key to development. If we want to promote our values we need to ensure access to education," Richardson said. Wood "has come up with the best distribution model for distributing literacy to the developing world."

Room to Read has helped seed a new industry in local-language children's books, commissioning nearly 200 titles, including Baby Fish Goes to School, by a 10-year-old Sri Lankan girl named Sarasi Iresh. The group has published and distributed 2.5 million copies to date.

Wood's story is evocative of that of another accidental philanthropist, Greg Mortenson, the Montana mountaineer who took a wrong turn while descending K2 in Pakistan and wound up in an impoverished village. Mortenson's subsequent founding of the Central Asia Institute, which has succeeded in building dozens of girls schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, is memorialized in the best-selling book, Three Cups of Tea: One man's mission to promote peace one school at a time, co-authored by David Oliver Relin.

But while Mortenson, a guileless man hopelessly unschooled in the ways of business, leads by example, Wood applies the corporate practices he acquired at Northwestern University and Microsoft to scale-up philanthropy. When asked whether he is more like Mortenson or Andrew Carnegie, the robber-baron industrialist who invested millions of his personal fortune building 2,800 libraries a century ago, Wood paused.

"I'm more like Carnegie in the sense that I want to take this to a massive scale. I am a fanatic about scale. I want to do 10 X on Carnegie. But it has to be we, not I. Room to Read will be the Carnegie of the developing world."

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