Entrepreneurship – Open Hearts Big Dreams

Why do you volunteer with OHBD and what impact has it had?

Ellenore Angelidis — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:04:43 +0000

Guest Post by Amelie LaPorte-Manahan I was adopted from Ethiopia as a child and have grown up in the Seattle area. My family first got involved with Open Hearts Big Dreams (OHBD) when I was a baby. They have been connected with OHBD ever since, but over the last few years I have been actively contributing. It’s exciting to be part of global literacy and this cultural community!

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Keeping Learning Alive Through 1,000+ Days Without School

Ellenore Angelidis — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 23:09:55 +0000

Keeping Learning Alive Through 1,000+ Days Without School A Community Story from Rural Ethiopia Yohannes Bimrew When the sun rises over the Choke Mountains in Gojjam, children used to begin their long walk to school. They followed narrow paths, crossed rocky ground, and faced cold, windy mornings just to learn. Birtukan was one of them. Every day, she and her friends made…

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Some Words of Inspiration from our Logo Designer and Artist Yeggy Michael

Ellenore Angelidis — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:30:40 +0000

Yeggy Michael, artist and designer of our logo, yeggysworld.com My vision is to provoke questions about natural cycles, provide a sense of place and to reflect on the movement of time. My paintings, I consider personal works though they are for others. They are positive contacts for vibrant thoughts and spiritual moment. I use mosaic to illustrate the unity and lusciousness of diversity.

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Board Members Are Critical to the Success of Any Organization

Ellenore Angelidis — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 17:47:55 +0000

I have done a lot of reflecting over the years on what ways of giving back are most impactful and motivating for me. I believe, since I have had a measure of success thanks to the support of many, I have an obligation to pay it forward. When my daughter Leyla was young, I started to think about ways I wanted to give back besides writing checks to worthy organizations. I felt I had more to…

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Bilingual Children’s Books delight Ethiopian and Greek kids in Greece

Ellenore Angelidis — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 05:37:35 +0000

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 well-known princess from Greek Mythology – who is also a…

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Advice from a OHBD CS Grad: Let’s build a future that the next generation will be thankful for

Ellenore Angelidis — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 19:00:49 +0000

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 to support our students from Dire Dawa…

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Celebrating Jane Kurtz IBBY Reading Promoter Award and her volunteer efforts with OHBD – Blog Post Three the Creative Process for OHBD Ready Set Go Books Project

Ellenore Angelidis — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 22:31:37 +0000

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 much of our team are volunteers and don’t work…

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Celebrating Jane Kurtz IBBY Reading Promoter Award and her volunteer efforts with OHBD – Blog Post Two WHY OHBD Ready Set Go Books Project Started

Ellenore Angelidis — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 18:49:46 +0000

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 written many children’s books as an award-winning author and…

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Global Emerging Leadership in Action: OHBD CS Graduate in Ethiopia Supporting LJL Founded by High School Junior in Seattle

Ellenore Angelidis — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 12:19:16 +0000

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 and a publication in the Journal of Student Research.

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Open Hearts Big Dreams – Five Years into the Organizational Journey

Ellenore Angelidis — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 19:24:32 +0000

In 2016, I started the process of taking Open Hearts Big Dreams from the fundraising event we started in 2011 to a full-fledged not-for-profit. I was inspired by our amazing daughter and the opportunities we saw to contribute after funding and expanding a library in her birth-town of Bahir Dar (pictured here). That year was spent recruiting board members, filing state and federal paperwork…

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