The Blue Sweater

Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to study global poverty and look for better ways to fight it. The title comes from a sweater she gave to Goodwill in Virginia and spotted eleven years later on a young boy in Rwanda, her name still on the tag. Her account runs from her first clumsy efforts as a young idealist in Africa to the organization she now leads, with stories of a bakery run by unwed mothers, women dancing in a slum in Nairobi, survivors of the Rwandan genocide and entrepreneurs serving the poor. She argues that traditional charity often fails and makes the case for patient capital, a form of philanthropic investing.

Seth Godin called it a classic that continues to change lives and held up Novogratz as someone who shows up and does the work every day for decades.