The Blue Sweater Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

In her book, The Blue Sweater, international philanthropist Jacqueline Novogratz tells the story of meeting a young man in Pakistan who is volunteering to help build 5,000 low cost homes for people in poverty.

She asked the young man why he had chosen to work 16 hours a day in the cold for no money and no social life.

He looked at her and replied, actually, I feel like a man finally.

as a young woman I dreamed of changing the world. In my 20s I went to Africa to try and save the continent only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving.

I spent the last few days immersed in your book and also listening to you speak and, you know, reading other things you've written and said and things that have been written about you.

I think that we could spend an hour just talking about your story as it's told in the book.

And I think that I want to spend a bit of time there, but I want to focus on the present and what you're doing now and what you're learning now and we then the formative experiences you had in that way rather than spend 45 minutes telling the story of how you got here.

There's some place in your book I think where you're talking about a quality someone saw in you as an adult. And you talked about how the among the, among the qualities they saw, they saw the Catholic girl who can scrub a floor, scrub a kitchen floor into every, until every corner of the signs.

I believe it's in the blue sweater I think it's a very striking sentence here at generosity is easier than justice.

as a young woman I dreamed of changing the world. In my 20s I went to Africa to try and save the continent only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving.

I spent the last few days immersed in your book and also listening to you speak and, you know, reading other things you've written and said and things that have been written about you.

I think that we could spend an hour just talking about your story as it's told in the book.

And I think that I want to spend a bit of time there, but I want to focus on the present and what you're doing now and what you're learning now and we then the formative experiences you had in that way rather than spend 45 minutes telling the story of how you got here.

I love that. Okay, all right. So I mean, I would do want to spend a little bit of time telling some of that and I can tell some of it in the script too, but I just think it's important for people to know what's happening, you know, what this is now and what it means now.

There's some place in your book I think where you're talking about a quality someone saw in you as an adult. And you talked about how the among the, among the qualities they saw, they saw the Catholic girl who can scrub a floor, scrub a kitchen floor into every, until every corner of the signs.