John Wood

John J. Wood is an American former technology executive who founded Room to Read, one of the largest international organisations working on children's literacy and girls' education, and which has run programmes in India since the mid-2000s.

Wood studied at the University of Colorado Boulder and took an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management before a period in commercial banking and then a job at Microsoft. On a trip to Nepal he visited village schools and found that many had no resources for books. He collected about 3,000 books from friends and family and took them back, and the response persuaded him to leave the company. He described the decision in a memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, published in 2006.

Room to Read was founded in 1999 with Erin Keown Ganju and Dinesh Shrestha. Wood and Shrestha worked with rural communities to put up school buildings, called School Rooms, and libraries, called Reading Rooms, rather than running the programmes at a distance. In 2000 the organisation added a girls' education programme built on a long-term commitment to each girl's schooling rather than a one-off scholarship, and it works through local partner organisations and governments. It has since worked in 28 countries and reports reaching 50 million children.

Wood stepped down from Room to Read's global board in December 2021 and founded U-Go, a non-profit that funds university education for women in low-income countries; it reports having funded scholarships for 5,900 women by the end of 2025.[2][3]