Priya.

It starts with something small: a book a child can actually read. In the communities where Room to Read works, that is rarer than it sounds. Many children learn in a language their textbooks were never written in, in classrooms with no library at all. So Room to Read builds the missing pieces from the ground up: it publishes original children's books in local languages, trains teachers in how reading is really learned, and turns bare rooms into libraries children want to return to.

For the youngest students, the Literacy Program means daily practice with a teacher who knows how to teach reading, and shelves stocked with stories set in a world that looks like theirs. Children in these schools go on to read more than twice as fast as their peers in comparison schools.

For adolescent girls, the Girls' Education Program is a mentor who stays. Through the years when so many girls are pulled out of school to marry or to work, a trained social mobilizer walks beside them, building life skills and holding the door to the next grade open. Most girls in the program advance every year.

None of it is abstract. It is one book, one classroom, one girl who stays in school one more year — multiplied across 29 countries and, over 25 years, more than 60 million children.