John Green
Best-selling author John Green is on a mission to make the world suck less. At least, that was the original impetus behind his aptly-named Foundation to Decrease World Suck (FTDWS), the nonprofit he started in 2007 with his brother and fellow Vlogbrothers YouTube channel creator, Hank. However, he says, if you had told them then that FTDWS would become 'a real charity that would go on to raise real tens of millions of dollars,' they might have called it something different.
Still, the name works, as it gets right to the root of what the Greens are striving to do by awarding a total of more than $10 million in grants to dozens of charities since 2012—from perennial recipients Partners in Health and Save the Children to 30-plus other organizations recommended by the participants of the brothers' annual 48-hour telethon-style fundraiser Project for Awesome (P4A). In February, the most recent P4A event raised nearly $3.8 million for an array of nonprofits.
'We used to try to have a measurement of global suck,' Green says. 'I've come to understand you can't really quantify it that way. But you can quantify what makes things better, which is more people having access to health care, education, professional opportunities, etc.'
While public health issues have long been a focus of Green's philanthropic efforts, more recently, he has turned his attention to one global health crisis in particular: tuberculosis. In 2019, during an eye-opening visit to a hospital in Sierra Leone, Green saw firsthand the challenges facing patients and doctors fighting what remains the deadliest infectious disease in the world—despite being completely curable, when treated with sufficient resources. According to the World Health Organization's most recent report, an estimated 1.25 million people died from TB in 2023 alone.
When he returned home from the trip, Green says he began regularly reading and writing about the topic, an undertaking that eventually resulted in his second nonfiction release, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. The book debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list following its March 18 publication, with a first run of 500,000 copies.
'Tuberculosis has had such a profound impact on human history,' he says. 'This is a disease that has probably killed around one in seven people who've ever lived, and infected many more than that.'
Last year, Green announced he and his family would donate $1 million annually to help fund the work being done to fight tuberculosis in the Philippines, the country with the fourth-highest burden of TB globally. This commitment is part of a larger project Green is involved with that will see a coalition of government agencies and public health advocates provide over $100 million in funding for comprehensive TB care in Ethiopia and the Philippines over the next four years. In 2023, he also publicly rallied his nearly 3.9 million YouTube subscribers to petition Johnson & Johnson to lower the cost of the tuberculosis treatment bedaquiline, which the company did.
Although Green is best known for his massively popular young adult fiction, particularly his 2012 juggernaut The Fault in Our Stars, he says it's his humanitarian work that makes him feel like he's using his platform in a meaningful way. As he puts it, 'What's the point, otherwise?'
Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com.
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