Leadership Series: Is Change an Uphill Battle?

Or consider John Wood, a former Microsoft marketing executive who, while trekking in Nepal in 1998, happened upon a rural school in the Himalayas with only a handful of books. Through one e-mail to family and friends, he collected 3,000 books and returned the following year, rented a yak, and delivered the books to the acclaim of the students and local villagers. Today, the nonprofit Room to Read is building, staffing and stocking libraries for 10 million children in six Asian nations and South Africa.

Shifting the paradigm
Entrepreneurs like these are turning 60-plus years of nonprofit management upside down with innovative and sustainable programs marked by personal passion, creative communications and the ease of online fund- and friendraising via blogs, social-networking sites and peer-to-peer advertising.