‘Toilet Hacker’ and Kidnapped Journalist Named Game Changers in Philanthropy

John Kluge Jr.’s philanthropy doesn’t look at all like that of his father, the billionaire television mogul who is perhaps best known for his $400-million gift to Columbia University.

Instead, the young Mr. Kluge is proud of his philanthropic role as a “toilet hacker” who is working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to bring toilets to the homes of needy people in Africa, Asia, and Central America.

It’s such unusual approaches that captured the attention of Town & Country magazine for its list of 50 people it says are “changing the game” of philanthropy.

Among other innovators spotlighted in the December issue:

n Amanda Lindhout, a freelance journalist who was kidnapped while on assignment in Somalia and held captive for 15 months by Somali teenagers who beat and raped her. During captivity, she says, she would often think that if she was ever given a second chance at life she would do something to “be of service” to others.

She founded the Global Enrichment Foundation, which supports education, hunger relief, and other programs in Somalia, with a special emphasis on helping women and survivors of sexual abuse. But the foundation also helps people like those who attacked her. Ms. Lindhout acknowledges that many are surprised by her decision to help people very much like her captors.

“It’s a sad state of affairs, but they were also a product of war and poverty in their environment,” she says. “They had nowhere to turn besides these criminal and terrorist gangs.”

n Rebecca McDonald and Tanyella Evans, who together founded Library for All, a nonprofit that is working to create an online library for those around the globe living in poverty. The idea was born of Ms. McDonald’s experiences in Haiti, where she moved to help rebuild schools after the 2010 earthquake.

While there she found that few of the schools had books, and those that did kept them locked away. She wondered how children could get an education with so few resources, and with Ms. Evans, who had taught school in Uganda, she set out to provide reading materials to schools in need. Last year, the two women chose one school, Respire, in Gressier, Haiti, for its pilot program. With the help of New York University and six publishing companies, the group has made 1,000 titles available on low-cost e-tablets that were given to the school’s 530 students.

“The ultimate idea is to have a library in the cloud and for students anywhere to be able to access everything,” says Ms. Evans, “whether it’s an English-to-Creole dictionary or a science book.”