Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund to host Worldreader.org founder

The Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund will welcome David Risher, founder of Worldreader.org, as the guest speaker for its next General Meeting on Feb. 26, which will be held at the Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club from 1-2:30 p.m.

Risher, a former executive with Amazon, decided to take his passion for books to a whole new level and work to eradicate illiteracy at the same time. The result is Worldreader.org, a nonprofit organization with the goal of placing an e-Reader in the hands of every impoverished student throughout the world.

Richer’s inspiration came to him when he volunteered in an Ecuadorian orphanage. He noticed a padlocked building that was filled with books. When he asked why the books were locked away, the director replied, “I lost the key,” and added that the girls at the orphanage had begun to lose interest in those books and new books would take months to arrive.

With his experience as an executive at Amazon and also at Microsoft, Risher had the solution for wiping out worldwide illiteracy by providing young readers access to current popular books and interesting reading material. Risher now heads up the nonprofit Worldreader.org. Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund member Star Lerach was present at the launch of Worldreader at the Kibera Girls’ Soccer Academy in Kenya.

Worldreader.org has discovered it is faster and less expensive to provide e-Book readers than to ship boatloads of books around the world. The e-Books also provide dictionaries, increase font for sight impairment, text to speech for new readers, locally published books in the native language and even health information. The devices use the same 2G networks common to cell-phone use in the developing world. Also, these E-Book readers give the recipients the power to choose what they want to read.

Thanks to the team at Worldreader.org and their corporate partners, a culturally relevant library can now be placed in the palm of the world’s poorest people — digitally and inexpensively.

Please come join the RSF Women’s Fund at this event. Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund events are open to

all

women living in Rancho Santa Fe with an interest in philanthropy.

The mission of the Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund is to educate, inspire and increase the number of women committed to philanthropy in order to strengthen the community and impact lives through informed, focused, collective giving.