Your generosity becomes the words that girls will use to express themselves and build lives of their own choosing. Your compassion becomes the stories that young learners will hold in their hearts and share with their own children. Most importantly, your thoughtfulness becomes a better life for every student, family, and community that we reach, both now and for years to come. Your support is their success. Their triumph is your legacy. Visit our new Legacy Giving Page
When you include a gift for Room to Read in your will…
Legacy Giving
Stories from our Legacy Community
"If you are looking for a way to have a profound, positive impact on global education, that costs you nothing now, I highly recommend including Room to Read in your will. It is the most impactful way to invest in a brighter future for all."
- Craig Herb, Room to Read supporter since 2007
Establishing Your Legacy is Easy
With charitable gift planning, you can create a legacy gift that will extend your support for years to come. It's simple to structure your gift to maximize its benefits in a way that is most favorable to you, your loved ones and the organizations you choose.
For assistance please contact Caitlin Nagel, our Legacy Giving Manager, at legacy@roomtoread.org or follow the steps below.
Easy Guide to Include Room to Read in Your Will
To include Room to Read in your will you will need our address and charity registration number. Please see below for these details, including Room to Read’s recommended free will-writing service for your country, if we have one. If your country is not listed below, please use our United States information or reach out to legacy@roomtoread.org for more information.
Creating a legacy gift allows you to designate your investment to the work that you are most passionate about. Most of our supporters choose to invest in our greatest need. Should you choose not to designate your investment, it will go toward Room to Read’s Future Fund, ensuring your gift is used for maximum possible impact as part of our operational reserves, strengthening our ability to execute our mission in an unpredictable future. This Fund enables organizational nimbleness and ensures protection against the unexpected, as well as financial flexibility to identify, test, and invest in new, even more efficient approaches to delivering our programs to the children who need them most.
United States
EIN/Tax ID: 91-2003533
Address: Room to Read, 465 California Street, Suite 1000, San Francisco, CA 94104
Recommended will-writing service: FreeWill
Australia & New Zealand
ABN: 13 133 277 666
Address: Room to Read Australia Limited, P.O. Box R1017, Royal Exchange, NSW, 1225 Australia
Canada
Charity BN: 85061 2417 RR0001
Address: Room to Read Canada of 2405 Pine Street, P.O. Box 46877, Vancouver, BC V6J 3E9
Hong Kong
Registration Number: 1117869
Address: Room to Read Hong Kong Ltd, Room to Read 87/F International Commerce Centre One Austin Road West Kowloon Hong Kong
Recommended will-writing service: ForeverGift or call +852 5468 3635
India
Registration Number: TI22579
Address: D21 Corporate Park, Office No. 201E (B), 2nd Floor, Sector-21, Dwarka, New Delhi – 110075
Singapore
EIN/Tax ID: 91-2003533
Address: Room to Read, 465 California Street, Suite 1000, San Francisco, CA 94104
Switzerland
Identification Number/TIN: CHE-237.755.163
Address: Room to Read – Schweiz c/o First Names (Switzerland Ltd) Am Schanzengraben 25, PO Box 8022 Zurich
United Kingdom
Registration Number: 1125803
Address: Room to Read UK Limited, Bracken House, 1 Friday Street, London, EC4M 9BT
What if I want to make Room to Read the beneficiary of my retirement, life insurance, or other accounts?
To designate Room to Read as a beneficiary you will need our address, listed under the previous question.
If your account is held in the United States, you can plan your beneficiary designations through FreeWill.
Yes, please let us know so we can express our gratitude and welcome you into our Legacy Community. Email legacy@roomtoread.org to reach Caitlin Nagel, our Legacy Giving Manager.
Spotlight: Craig Herb on creating his legacy
Craig, you have been involved with Room to Read from our earliest days, starting by volunteering in our San Francisco office. Have you always been involved in volunteering and giving back to the community?
I can’t say that I always have. My resume is littered with odd jobs, fits and starts, and some serendipity along the way. The work ethic I formed early was mixed with some luck that found me at Microsoft in my twenties, which is where I spent most of my career.
I feel that life started to get most interesting for me as I began to be exposed to some of the world’s most complex challenges as I traveled throughout Asia and Central America, in some of the places Room to Read works. While I did encounter crushing poverty and sadness, the part that I didn’t expect was the incredible tenacity of the human spirit in some of the most under-resourced places that I visited.
What struck me most was the yearning for opportunity, which was continually found synonymous with education. This was oftentimes pursued not for personal gain, but to support their family and their community. It was so different from what I was used to in my own culture which tended to prioritize the individual. It was surprising and touching, and I was moved by so much of what I saw that it helped me redefine what I thought community should be and what relationships should look like.
It was then that I started to be challenged by the Albert Schweitzer quote: “At that point in life where your talent meets the needs of the world, that is where God wants you to be.” My world revolving singularly around Microsoft started to then seem a bit small and unfulfilling while my career and many of my other influences were brightly illuminating the necessity of education; education for all.
Given what I was seeing, it was exciting for me to start thinking about the next chapter in my life. I found Room to Read through some quick research and immediately saw that it checked a lot of boxes for myself and my wife, Brenda. She is a teacher, so education was tremendously important to her, and the gender piece spoke to both of us in a big way.
Working at Microsoft gave me the opportunity to be surrounded by so many smart people from all different walks of life. I quickly understood that education was the great equalizer and to deny someone an education because of their gender or where they were born, to limit their opportunity and potential in that way, was something I found unjust and hard to reconcile.
This culminated in me spending nine months volunteering at Room to Read’s San Francisco office, during which time I got sucked into all the great things Room to Read was doing and, equally as important, how they were doing them. After leaving San Francisco to return back to my home in Raleigh, I had a great desire to continue my work with Room to Read, which is how I wound up founding Room to Read’s volunteer chapter in Washington, DC.
Frederick Buechner defines vocation as the place where “your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.” I felt like this was the first time I had the opportunity to apply my talents creatively to intersect this “deep hunger.”
My experience with non-profits is that oftentimes “the closer you get the less you like.” My experience with Room to Read was just the opposite. A rare mix of a spot-on mission, data-driven focus, and a people-centric methodology lured me into supporting the organization any way I could. For 11 years I volunteered, advocated, and fundraised for Room to Read through my work with the DC Chapter, and my wife Brenda and I have happily invested financially as well.
Room to Read has always pushed the envelope in terms of challenging the standards of what the world is and what it can be. They have continued with bold thinking in terms of integrating their programming into government curriculums to ensure sustainability and growth, and they have also demonstrated how education is the solution to so many of the world’s problems, like climate change, conflict, and poor health. They impressed me as a true learning company; one continually open to improving.
As our two children are now grown, with families and lives of their own, we realized that they are far less in need of our support than the millions of children around the world who still lack access to quality education. In reviewing our will, it became logical and exciting for us to include a future gift for Room to Read. Through this experience, we realized anew that our support is intrinsically tied to the success of young learners around the world and that their success was truly the legacy that Brenda and I valued.
Why did you choose to use our free bequest tool to create your will and what was your experience like using it?
As Brenda and I talked about what this new will might prioritize, we realized that our will was surprisingly not very complicated. Using Room to Read’s free bequest tool through FreeWill made the process both simple and free, which are two words I like!
There are probably 1,000 different ways I can answer this question, but the one that comes to mind the quickest is the closest to my heart. I think about the word “agency” a lot. To me, this ability to make choices, identify goals, and act upon them is so important and is something that Room to Read specifically teaches as part of their Girls’ Education Program. I was understanding more each day all the pressure and mixed messages girls experience, both here in the US and around the world, wondering, how do they find their voice? Without education, I saw that girls faced outdated thinking that minimizes their importance, opportunities, and yes – their agency.
If you value education for all and envision a world where illiteracy and gender inequality are problems of the past, to me there is no better investment than Room to Read. If you have the means, I encourage you to make a reoccurring donation of any amount – it is a wonderful way to provide crucial funding for children’s education every month. But, if you are looking for a way to have a profound, positive impact on global education, that costs you nothing now, I highly recommend including Room to Read in your will. It is the most impactful way to invest in a brighter future for all and with Room to Read offering supporters a free tool to create or update their will, I found it to be very rewarding and surprisingly easy.
Contact Us
To notify us of a gift or ask questions about Legacy Giving, please contact us.
Martyn, you have been a tremendous partner to Room to Read for 15 years. What inspired you to get involved? One of the drivers of my life has been the knowledge that my mother, who was born in the early years of the 20th century, was taken out of school by her father at the age of 13 because he didn’t think that girls should be educated. My mother never expressed any resentment of that fact, even though she had been doing extremely well at school, but she determined that her children would never be in the position she was put in. She went to enormous lengths to make sure that my three siblings and I had the benefit of the education she missed out on. That is why the whole concept of Room to Read and its work around gender equality really resonated with me. You spent your career as a solicitor, helping people with their estate planning. When it came to writing your own will, what factors did you take into consideration? The factors that I considered in creating my will were my individual circumstances, as well as my wife’s. Most importantly, we wanted to determine the needs of our family and make sure they were protected. We have three sons and six grandchildren, so they were at the forefront of our minds. At the same time, we are very conscious of how lucky we have been in the way life has panned out for us and so we wanted to include gifts to charities whose missions resonated with us most. We knew we couldn’t benefit every cause, so we decided to prioritize education and we selected Room to Read because we believe very passionately in what they are doing and how they are doing it. While everyone’s situation is different, one thing that is constant is that everyone ought to make a will. As a solicitor, I would say this, but it’s true. A will is necessary to protect everyone and everything you care about. The positive side of this is that there is an appropriate option for nearly everyone to support the causes they care about by including a gift to charity in their will. It gives everyone the opportunity to invest in their vision for a better future. Speaking of the future, what excites you about Room to Read’s future? When I think about the future, I feel both excited and frustrated. Room to Read has reached more than 32 million children, which is truly remarkable, but we live in a world that has more than 7 billion people, hundreds of millions of which are illiterate. I truly believe that we will get to a place where Room to Read will no longer need to exist, but it isn’t going to happen in my lifetime. I take real confidence in knowing that Room to Read has a plan to keep growing and expanding access to education. Gender equality in education is so important, especially in societies that are very patriarchal, and I am heartened by the progress we have made so far. These changes don’t happen overnight, and I am hopeful for the future knowing that organizations like Room to Read exist and will keep advancing progress for girls and students around the world until a quality education is something that everyone can take for granted. 
