July 2023 – Open Hearts Big Dreams (OHBD) is delighted to announce that two of their OHBD-Ready Set Go Books (RSG) have been honored with Gourmand Awards 2023. My Five Senses, by Elizabeth Spor Taylor, was listed as First in “Food Books for Children—Africa.” And Letter from a Plow Nation, by Dr. Worku L. Mulat, …
Open Hearts Big Dreams Ready Set Go Books Honored Among “Best in the World” Read More »
Open Hearts Big Dreams Launches Black History Month Collaboration with Etan Comics February 2023 – To celebrate Black History Month, Open Hearts Big Dreams (OHBD) is launching a special collaboration with Etan Comics, the creator of the character Jember, the first Ethiopian superhero. The partnership makes the children’s book version of Jember available in …
Open Hearts Big Dreams Launches Black History Month Collaboration with Etan Comics Read More »
We have a wonderful collaboration with Pelargos that helps bring Greek and Amharic versions of some our favorite books to kids in Greece. Below is a translation, thank you Michael Angelidis, from a recent article in Greece about this initiative. For those that read Greek, here is the original Did you know that Andromeda, the …
Bilingual Children’s Books delight Ethiopian and Greek kids in Greece Read More »
In late 2020, we were awarded a grant from the American Corners to run Computer Science and Entrepreneurship Boot Camps along with a series of leadership talks. It was the most challenging of environments with conflict and the virus each presenting what seemed like insurmountable challenges. The OHBD team had to consistently reinvent and reimagine …
Debtsa is a small agricultural community in the high mountains of southwest Ethiopia. It’s a hard 2-day drive from Addis Ababa, mostly on dirt roads. It is beautiful, it is remote. It’s challenging to get there, it’s challenging to stay there, and it’s especially challenging to leave. A piece of my heart is planted there …
A New Library, A New Language for OHBD-RSG Books, More Big Dreams! Read More »
Process and Creative are often oxymorons. But with this project we needed to make them play nice together. We need to be creative without losing sight of our goals to create many culturally appropriate bilingual books for children in Ethiopia and beyond. And we needed process that would overwhelm or undermine being creative especially since …
Creating children’s books is not an easy endeavor. My first children’s books took 10 years from writing the story, thinking I would illustrate it but not finding the time, then finding a busy illustrator and working through all the different versions to finally teaching myself to self-publish and releasing it into the world. Jane has …
Open Hearts Big Dreams Creative Lead Jane Kurtz Honored with a Prestigious International “Reading Promoter” Award August 2022 – Open Hearts Big Dreams (OHBD) is delighted to announce that Jane Kurtz, who volunteers with OHBD as the creative lead on OHBD Ready Set Go Books (RSG), will be receiving an exceptionally high honor from the …
We are delighted to kick off a series of posts celebrating our volunteer Creative Lead Jane Kurtz whose work with us (and others) was recognized by IBBY with a Reading Promoter Award. In a couple weeks, Jane will be accepting the award in Malaysia. Leyla and I are thrilled to be joining her. There is …
I am an incoming High School Junior, founder of Linguistics Justice League (LJL) and a Youth Board Member of Invest in Youth. I have been working at the intersection of Data Science, NLP and ML, earning a Society of Women Engineers Next (SWE) STEM in Action award, National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) award …
