Once Doyne expanded the children’s home (and had her makeover, gaining false eyelashes and blond highlights— all very briefly), she began to focus on education. Last year, she won a $100,000 grand prize in a contest run by www.DoSomething.org, and that money provided the wherewithal to start a new school that she had long dreamed of. An Australian architect who met Doyne on Facebook flew to Nepal to design the buildings, and the project began taking shape. The school now has classes from kindergarten through sixth grade, as well as a library, a cafeteria and an outdoor auditorium. The plan is to expand it one year at a time until it is a high school as well.

Having become in effect a principal who never went to college, Doyne was passionate that the school would be academically outstanding. She recruited teachers who would forswear corporal punishment and encourage creativity rather than rote learning. The entire region has taken heed of Doyne’s school project, with officials pleading for their children’s admission. Some upper-caste parents were aghast that low-caste mothers would be preparing meals for upper-caste children, but they bit their lips and were silent in the hope that their children could attend. A one-hour enrollment session seeking just 40 children was swamped by 500 kids pleading for admission.

The school opened with 220 students and will soon expand to 300. The plan is to offer health care and dental care as well, starting with deworming the children — because their load of intestinal worms leaves them anemic. A $300 donation covers a child’s educational costs for a year at the school, including health and dental care. Doyne is also working on a vocational element, training kids to raise livestock for a living, to repair bicycles or to develop other skills that will give them steady incomes. The school is coed, but the girls who attend are particularly important to Doyne, for two reasons. One is that uneducated girls are particularly at risk of exploitation. The other is that there’s considerable evidence that educating girls is one of the best investments available in the developing world, because it leads to lower birth rates and a more skilled and productive labor force.

As for her own needs, Doyne is blasé. When she had an infected tooth in a remote village far from any doctor, and her face swelled up so that she couldn’t even see, a local man obligingly took a chisel and pliers and pulled the tooth — without any painkiller. Regarding education, Doyne is thinking about earning a college degree by correspondence someday (my hunch is that she’ll have an honorary doctorate before she has a B.A.). Listening to her chatter about her shelter and school, describing her hopes to replicate her model in other countries, it’s easy to forget something quite extraordinary: she’s still only 23.

It’s fair to object that activists like Doyne are accomplishing results that, however noble, are minuscule. Something like 101 million children aren’t attending primary school around the world, so 220 kids in Doyne’s school constitute the teensiest drop in the bucket. The larger problem can be solved only if governments make education a top priority (which they haven’t), just as ending the wars in Congo may require the concerted action of states. Well-meaning individuals like Doyne help at the edges but don’t fundamentally change the nature of the challenge; indeed, charitable construction of schools and hospitals may sometimes free up governments in poor countries to use their money to buy weapons instead.

All that is true — but it’s equally true that if you happen to be that drop in the bucket, Doyne is transforming your life. And afterward, you may become an education advocate as well, transforming other people’s lives. As Doyne herself puts it, “If your own children were born orphans in Nepal, you wouldn’t wait for the U.N or the government to do something about it while they were hungry and cold and breaking rocks by the side of a riverbed.”

Of course, not everyone is ready to move off to Nepal and exchange bar-hopping for lice-minimization. Many people want to connect to a cause larger than themselves, but they are busy and juggling priorities, have limited time and don’t know quite what to do. There’s a market failure there: so many people who would like to help, and so many people who would benefit from that help, but there’s a shortage of channels to connect them. (On my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, I’ve listed some practical ideas for how to help as well as contact information for organizations working at the grass roots — including those mentioned in this article.)