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Dec 12, 2006
"Prosperity is a way of living and thinking, and not just money or things. Poverty is a way of living and thinking, and not just a lack of money or things." --Eric Butterworth
A Rocket Scientist's Odyssey of Good
47-year old Jim Fruchterman, a 2006 MacArthur "Genius" is a rocket scientist turned social entrepreneur. His idea: Take existing technology and transform it into products for those with disabilities or other disadvantages. Fructerman’s early work involved the production of a reading machine for the blind using optical character recognition. His non-profit, Benentech, created Bookshare.org -- the world’s largest online library of books (more than 30,000 in all) for people with disabilities; they’ve also developed gear to find land mines in war-torn areas and invented a better way for human rights organizations to store and document abuse investigations. Fruchterman’s own motivation? His initial feeling of being the only guy in Silicon Valley not trying to make a billion dollars, "I'd like to help people not be as lonely as I was the first few years," he says.
BE THE CHANGE
Where is there prosperity in your own way of living and thinking? Leverage that privilege to support someone who could benefit from it.
