Jim Ziolkowski
President & CEO
Jim’s path to Building with Books began while trekking around the world in 1990, when he happened upon a village in mountainous Nepal as it was celebrating the opening of its first school. The outpouring of pride he witnessed from the villagers would change the course of his life.
Later, as a member of GE Capital's Financial Management Program, Jim kept thinking back to that celebration and eventually decided to devote his efforts full-time to spreading educational opportunity and youth empowerment around the world. Putting action to inspiration, he left GE in 1992 and founded Building with Books.
Working closely with his brother David, Jim set off to Brazil, Malawi and Nepal to build the first three schools. Once they were built, Jim continued working alongside villagers for several more years to further develop a methodology that would empower the world’s poorest communities to build their own schools. At the same time, he developed unique after-school programs and an interconnecting methodology that engages U.S. students in serving their own communities and empowers them to help build schools world-wide.
More than a decade and a half later, Jim is still the guiding force of BwB and has been strongly influenced by personal meetings with Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama. However, Jim has been most profoundly influenced by the youth he has worked with from America’s biggest cities to the poorest villages on the planet. It is their courage and thirst for education that inspire Jim everyday.
Jim graduated cum laude from Michigan State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Finance.