“Mullaney has helped vast numbers of children all over the world  – and by using local doctors in developing countries, he figured out how to lower costs, serve more people, and build local capacity.

He helped start an organization that provided a million free cleft surgeries and helping eliminate cleft in much of the world.

And now Mullaney is starting all over again to do the same with burns, cataracts, clubfoot, and more.”

Nicholas Kristof

New York Times columnist, Two time Pulitzer Prize winner, Best-selling author 

Nick Kristof has been a hero of mine for many years.

I am an avid reader of his twice–a-week award-winning columns in the New York Times in which he writes about human rights, global health, sex trafficking and sometimes about my charities.

Nick was in my class at Harvard – he is one week older than me – but I didn’t meet him until 25 years later. In one of his columns, he wrote that charity managers are horrible marketers and they should hire people that are good at selling toothpaste and shampoo.

I got such a kick out of this I took a guess at what his email might be and sent him an email saying I loved his column, that I used to sell toothpaste and shampoo and I was now the founder and CEO of one of America’s most popular charities, the Smile Train.

He emailed me back the very next day and the day after that we were having lunch at a New York café. He was just as good in person as he is in print – we had a great conversation.

I thought I was a world traveler, but I don’t come close to Nick Kristof. He has lived on four continents, traveled to 150+ countries, every state in the United States, every province in China and every major island in Japan.

One thing I really admire about Nick is that he’ll go just about anywhere to tell a story that needs to be told, and to help people that really need help – no matter how difficult, remote or dangerous it may be.

He goes to places like the Sudan, the Congo, Syria, Afghanistan, Haiti, etc.

I love talking with him because I’ve been to many of the places he has. It is so rare to find anyone that has seen extreme poverty firsthand. Not only has he seen extreme poverty he has done a lot to raise awareness about the plight of billions of people who are struggling to survive on less than one dollar a day.

Nick cares deeply about global health and how Western medicine and technology can save tens, maybe hundreds of millions of lives in developing countries.

He asked me a lot of questions about Smile Train and seemed pretty impressed at how we could manage partners and programs in almost 100 countries with a small team of less than 50 employees. He has included both of my charities Smile Train and WonderWork in his New York Times column and his best-selling books.

During our conversation, I told him that after switching from my for-profit career to nonprofit, I learned an important lesson: helping other people is the most selfish thing you can ever do, because you always get back much more than you give.

I was a little surprised when he whipped out his pencil and wrote down what I said. The next week he included my quote – with credit – in one of his columns which was a real honor.

After our lunch I stayed in touch with Nick and he helped us in many ways big and small. During Christmas, Nick told all of his readers that Smile Train was a great charity and they should consider supporting us.

He wrote about both Smile Train and WonderWork in his #1 best-selling books which he co-wrote with his very talented wife, Sheryl WuDunn.

I was always very grateful for his support and also for having the opportunity to meet him and get to know him.

He is such an extraordinary person with tremendous talent, and he uses it all to help other people in need.

That is a rare breed.

Here are a couple of other reasons why Nick Kristof is one of my heroes…

Nick Kristof has been a columnist for The Times since 2001 and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei. While working in France after high school, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia during his student years, writing articles to cover his expenses. He’s also one of the very few Americans to be at least a two-time visitor to every member of the so-called “Axis of Evil.” During his travels, he has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, mobs and an African airplane crash.

After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo.

In 1990 Nick and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Ironically, one of my other “heroes”, Yan Mingfu was at the center of that controversy, and went to prison afterwards because he was considered too friendly to the students.

Nick and Sheryl were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called “his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world.” His other prizes include: the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Online News Association award and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award.

Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker, a Harvard classmate, has said: “I’m not surprised to see him emerge as the moral conscience of our generation of journalists. I am surprised to see him as the Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists.”

Bill Clinton said in September 2009: “There is no one in journalism, anywhere in the United States at least, who has done anything like the work he has done to figure out how poor people are actually living around the world, and what their potential is. … So, every American citizen who cares about this should be profoundly grateful that someone in our press establishment cares enough about this to haul himself all around the world to figure out what’s going on. … I am personally in his debt, as are we all.”

Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists, said in a 2013 statement: “Nick Kristof is the conscience of international journalism.”]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says that a page one article by Nick Kristof in January 1997 about child mortality in the developing world helped direct the couple toward global health as a focus of philanthropy.