Scaling Global Change

1Introduction: Go Big or Go Home

At Room to Read, our first major identity crisis came when we were eight years into our work. Over the years, we’d achieved rapid growth in revenue and staff. We’d also expanded the number of elementary schools with our literacy program and the scale of our girls’ education program every year. Yet we had serious concerns about the quality of our programs. Were we really improving children’s learning? Was our model sustainable? Were we doing our absolute best to ensure children had better educational outcomes—or were we just pursuing growth for growth’s sake?

While we were asking ourselves these questions, we were getting more requests to extend our services. Our country teams were asking us to help teachers do a better job of teaching children to read. However, this would have pushed us deeply into the unknown, way past our comfort zone. We would be striking at the heart of schools’ core responsibilities. Would schools even allow us to help? In our Girls’ Education Program, country teams wanted to hire more full-time staff. They suggested creating “social mobilizers” to help girls to develop more consistent life skills.

These were huge new opportunities. They were exciting to consider, but did we have the talent and money to pull it off?

Investors were beginning to ask more specific questions about our impact. What difference were we really making? Were children reading better? Were governments adopting our programs? How do we define success, ...