Volunteer

IBBY Ethiopia and Open Hearts Big Dreams Announce Exciting New International Developments

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Yoseph Ayalew phone: 251 965 696 969 / 911 227 650 / email: yosephopenheartbigdreams@gmail.com Ellenore Angelidis phone: 425-295-8841 / email: ellenore@openheartsbigdreams.org IBBY Ethiopia and Open Hearts Big Dreams Announce Exciting New International Developments March 2024 – The Ethiopian Section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY Ethiopia) and Open

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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

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

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OHBD Language Preservation – Dizin Children’s Books for Maji Ethiopia: “an amazing treasure”

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

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Preserving a Rare Ethiopian Language for the Anuak People of Gambella

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

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Open Hearts Big Dreams – Five Years into the Organizational Journey

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

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