New wealth, new priorities

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While Woods' friends tried talking him out of leaving the corporate world, Ramji Raghavan's friend talked him into it. As head of product management at Citigroup's Citibank, he traveled all over the world for work. "I was like any other young M.B.A. yuppie trying to make it," says Raghavan in a phone interview from India. In the late 1990s, he was working in London as a consultant and was married with a daughter. "We were living well and not worried about money and expenses," he says. "But I was restless. I felt an inner urge to do something more meaningful."

That came in the form of returning to India to bring education to the poor. A social-minded schoolmate told him not to worry about the financial consequences and do what would be fulfilling. Raghavan took his friend's advice, but talking his wife into leaving London's posh Kensington neighborhood to move back to their native India wasn't easy. Indian cities are "a mess," and they'd be living off his savings.

They decided the sacrifice was worth it. Raghavan's family connections helped get him meetings with the country's top scientists. Together, they devised a model to bring creative, hands-on methods of teaching science to remote Indian villages. The organization, Agastya International Foundation, trains instructors who travel throughout the region in repurposed vans and teach one-day creative science lessons to poor children. The hands-on method gets the students excited about learning. Agastya has about 20 mobile labs. Each one can reaches about 50,000 children per year, Raghavan says.

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Like Raghavan and Wood, Jane Newman was inspired to educate the world's poor after working in corporate America for 30 years. Newman was a founding partner at the Madison Avenue advertising firm Merkley Newman and Harty. It was a job that enabled her to buy a downtown duplex and a farm upstate. When she retired, she intended to do "nothing" after she returned from a six-month trip around the world. Her criteria: She would only visit places that didn't have electricity.

Those communities profoundly affected her. She decided to stay, but she wasn't quite sure what to do. "No one is in need of a Madison Avenue executive in a small village," Newman says. Toward the end of her travels, she met David Campbell, the head of an African organization that uses the media to educate and enhance people's lives. She showed up at Cambpell's office, and since then, she has taken on a number of projects. She works in northern Kenya to set up pre-schools in outlying nomadic villages. She also devised a project that educates parents about important health issues by reaching out to children who are learning English in addition to their tribal language. Through the program, 12-year-olds in Kenya can receive a booklet to take home to their parents that explains things such as the importance of using a mosquito net to prevent malaria.

Her advertising skills and experience come in quite handy. "They were all relevant," Newman says. "Organizational skills are key. You also have to know how to develop strategies to achieve your goals and change them if necessary. I always have Plan B in my pocket. That was essential for advertising."

Newman returns to the U.S. for four months a year to teach an advertising class, for which she receives "a nice salary," and to fundraise. She spends the rest of the year in Kenya. "It's not easy, but I love everything about it," she says.