This is a guest post by Samara Alazar, one of volunteers about her experience leading a project to fundraise for locally printed books and distribute them in Ethiopia. Over the winter break of 2022, I traveled to Ethiopia. My goal was increasing literacy amongst underprivileged children. I have been working with Open Hearts Big Dreams […]
Spreading Book Joy in Ethiopia 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
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
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
How do we do it—pull meaning from symbols on paper, or from bits of light and dark in flickering electric impulses? This miracle is called reading. I learned to read in Maji, in deep southern Ethiopia. My mother taught me in my own childhood language of English. As I filled workbooks at our dining room
My educational journey started in Gambella, Ethiopia where I was born. Growing up, I never had nongovernmental printed Anuak books. The school provided textbooks which we always returned at the end of each year. Since the schools couldn’t afford to print new copies each year, we were always given the same recycled books. It’s only
Preserving a Rare Ethiopian Language for the Anuak People of Gambella Read More »
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
Open Hearts Big Dreams – Five Years into the Organizational Journey Read More »
It was a big month for Open Hearts Big Dreams. We had our best GiveBIG effort ever – thank you to all who matched, gave, or shared! None of this work is possible without the funding we receive through these types of efforts! We hosted our first locally-focused workshop event organized and led by our
OHBD’s Leadership Focus Creates Our Newest Leaders Read More »
In a study published last year in the Journal of Happiness Studies, researchers looked at data from nearly 70,000 subjects and concluded that volunteers were happier. People who start out at a lower level of well-being seem to get even more benefit from volunteering. But I don’t need a study to tell me that volunteer
Why Do I Volunteer for OHBD? From our Creative Lead, Author Jane Kurtz Read More »
Our visit was incredible. We did cool things like climb the Simien Mountains and met great people like the ones I am going to tell you about. OHBD did so many good things. When we were in Dangla, we met a science teacher from Project Ethiopia. He was showing students how to measure viscosity of
My Amazing Trip to Ethiopia Read More »
