Room To Read Co-Founder and CEO Erin Ganju spoke at the second annual TEDxBerkeley conference held on February 19, 2011 in Berkeley, California. Erin delivered a passionate presentation called ‘Scaling Social Good’ about the impact Room To Read has made on millions of children in the developing world since 2000. The table below from the Room To Read website provides “just the numbers”. Watch the video to hear and see the full story.

Schools		1,442
Libraries		11,246
Books Published		553
Books Distributed		9.4 million
Girls’ Scholarships		10,590
Children Benefited		5.1 million

IMPORTANT: You must fast forward to the timestamp, 1:31:58, to see the start of Erin’s talk. Before you can do this, you will need to wait for a 30-second advertisement to play. Once the commercial is over, you can place your cursor on the gray shaded horizontal tool bar immediately below the screen to skip directly to her presentation. (When TEDxBerkeley posts the individual presenter videos to their website in the coming weeks, I’ll add a postscript to this blog post with the direct link to Erin’s.)

Watch live video from TEDxBerkeley on Justin.tv

The Big Sister Association of Greater Boston sponsored a wonderful event last night with the title of this post. It was AMAZING! From the moment I asked Jonah Beukman about parking, to meeting COO Mia Roberts when hanging up my overcoat, I felt an incredibly positive energy in the room. You can’t create a vibe like this out of thin air; it has to be real…and it was! Over 150 people were in the wonderful Artists for Humanity EpiCenter. We mingled, sampled hors d’oeuvres, made friends, started new relationships, and heard wonderful speeches.

Congratulations to Big Sister for such a fantastic evening. TRA360 is exploring ways in which we as an organization and as individuals can get more involved with a truly special and much-needed non-profit as Big Sister.

Rodney Brown wrote a recent article in Mass High Tech called “Consultants focus on matching the mission“. His piece told the story of ZMR Consulting, which according to their website “offers elite consulting services to align your CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives explicitly with your authentic business strategy, thereby improving the effectiveness of both.”

President Julianne Zimmerman and her team have created Authenticating REAL, an offering of core services aimed at helping a company align its social responsibility work with its corporate mission. ZMR’s mission statement is compelling to me for many reasons:

1. From a business standpoint, aligning corporate goals to corporate social responsibility just makes sense. It’s that simple.
2. Identifying, growing, and sustaining shared corporate values—these tasks are anything but easy.
3. Dedicating a consulting practice to finding ways to improve this alignment will raise awareness to the importance of volunteer service / corporate philanthropy in targeted companies.
4. From a personal standpoint, as TRA360 increases its commitment to community service, it’s great to know that a company like ZMR  exists, not only as a resource to us but to our own clients and customers.