During one of her early trips working for Room to Read in 2011, Geetha Murali, Ph.D., encountered girls in a remote area of Bangladesh who were just starting in the organization’s education program focused on adolescent girls. When Murali asked them some simple questions about their lives and what they liked, the girls struggled to articulate their preferences, such as their favorite colors or foods.

“You could tell they didn’t know they had a right to have their own opinions,” said Murali, CEO of the MDRT Foundation’s charity partner for the 2026 MDRT Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California, USA, and the 2026 MDRT Global Conference in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. “They even asked me how my husband let me make the trip.”

During that same year, however, Murali visited a cohort of girls in India approaching the end of their program participation who were going to be interviewed by the BBC, and Murali was primed to get them ready.

“They didn’t need me at all,” she said. “They had already found their voices. They built skills to assess their own opportunities and speak clearly and confidently about their dreams, aspirations and what would come next.”

This is Room to Read in a nutshell: a transformative organization that has changed the lives of 17 million children in 2025 alone (with more than 60 million supported across 29 countries since launching in 2000).

Foundational learning

Room to Read’s early-grade program is its Literacy Program, focused on developing children’s reading skills and habits and identifying literacy as a gatekeeper for future learning. According to UNESCO, more than 773 million people lack basic literacy skills, and nearly two-thirds are women and girls in low- and middle-income countries. Seventy percent of 10-year-olds cannot read or understand a simple text, according
to the World Bank Group.

By working locally, regionally and globally — developing core curriculums and children’s books, teacher trainings and international awareness — Room to Read, along with its 1,200 staff members and 20,000 partners, fosters progress in the micro and macro sense. It results in a domino effect, demonstrated in one example by the Room to Read teams facilitating learning between the Cambodian and Vietnamese governments so they can both build programs based on proven approaches.

“People can be resistant to Room to Read’s mission for many reasons,” Murali said. “A family may be navigating hardship or may not have had the opportunity to attend school themselves. A policymaker may be facing limited resources or competing priorities. Rather than framing it as persuasion, I try to bring us back to what literacy quietly makes possible in all our lives — reading a traffic sign, understanding instructions on a medicine bottle or walking into school with the confidence to open a book and begin.

“Those small moments are not small at all. They are the foundation of self-worth and dignity.”

Individualized expansion

Murali has personal experience with how one person’s choices can change a family’s future: Her mother rejected her family’s preference for her to marry very young and instead continued her education and eventually helped subsidize her younger siblings’ education.

“That recognition is what drives me,” she said. “Knowing that every time we make that change for children, their trajectories change, and to do that by the millions is my way of contributing a solution to a tangible problem in my lifetime.”

Taking over as CEO in 2018, Murali doubled the number of children served during her first few years. Room to Read continues to grow, particularly in Africa. The organization also creates book collections in the United States to counteract book deserts, and through government partnerships around the world, is helping set guidelines for procuring high-quality children’s books at scale for entire school systems. The motto? “Benefiting more children more quickly.”

During the pandemic, 70% of the children who Room to Read served had no access to the internet, which prevented tech-based replacements to their usual reading program. Rather than allow that learning loss, the organization converted camels into mobile libraries trekking in the deserts of Rajasthan in India, while boats brought books to communities isolated by water. Educators also rode bikes to deliver books at community homes in the morning, picked them up in the afternoon, sanitized them and repeated the process the next day. They used any means necessary to keep children learning.

Tools for living

Room to Read’s other signature program is a girls’ education program, particularly equipping girls from fifth grade through the end of high school with life skills and content knowledge so they can stay in school and make informed decisions. That includes help with everything from leadership and decision-making to learning about climate-related issues, health and hygiene, financial literacy, and even navigating the risks of early marriage, violence against women and trafficking. Women from the community identified as “social mobilizers” form what Murali calls an intermediary layer between home and school while identifying and mitigating risk factors.

But the program also promotes empowerment by developing adolescents’ sense of self-worth. So, when a teenager, Dewmini, in Sri Lanka, was told by her family that she should drop out of school to work as a home servant maid to supplement the income of a household facing food scarcity, she instead used what she learned through Room to Read. She created a family garden to grow and sell produce. She even helped other families do the same and won awards for her gardens.

“Dewmini’s story encapsulates the life skills piece of our work: the critical thinking, the resilience, the content knowledge and the power to solve your own challenges,” Murali said. “We focus on building the foundational skills children need and equipping them with the knowledge to choose their own paths.”

All funds raised through the MDRT Foundation will go toward Room to Read’s literacy and girls’ education programs to help support individuals or entire schools.

“It’s meaningful to improve the quality of any child’s life,” Murali said. “But when you’re able to do that by the millions, you see paths toward global solutions.”

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Removing barriers to literacy and life

Cure for pain

Growing together

Beyond the finish line

Providing a future

Expansion team

Fighting back

Ripple effect

Something to Give

Fighting trauma with hope