Benetech Bookshare.org awarded $32 million

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2008-10-21 07:38:00 UTC
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Jim Fruchterman, the founder of Benetech, is one of the real god-fathers of the social entrepreneurship movement. Benetech focuses on using innovative and creative technologies to solve some of humanities pressing problems.

In an announcement posted on his Beneblog today, Fruchterman shared the good news that the US Office of Special Education Programs had just awarded Benetech's Bookshare.org project a $32 million contract to dramatically scale up its services which provide "print disabled people in the United States with legal access to over 41,000 books and 150 periodicals that are converted to Braille, large print or digital formats for text to speech audio."

The five year award will allow them to increase the number of students they serve by a factor of ten, as well as help them bring more than 100,000 new books into their system. Congrats Benetech!

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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