Women – Open Hearts Big Dreams

A New Library, A New Language for OHBD-RSG Books, More Big Dreams!

Ellenore Angelidis — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 04:38:40 +0000

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 as firmly as the enormous ficus tree that stands in the center of the…

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

Ellenore Angelidis — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 18:23:42 +0000

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 table, I heard Ethiopian children in the little school nearby chanting their reading lessons…

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Creating OHBD RSG Books to Enhance Reading Comprehension Skills

Ellenore Angelidis — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 17:44:13 +0000

Learning to decode words — transforming marks on a page (or screen) into sounds in our brains — is one big reading skill. Learning to read those words fluently in sentences is another. The Creative Team considers those skills as we create Ready Set Go Books. But other skills are needed for understanding the sentences and paragraphs we read. When I was a senior lecturer in the English Department…

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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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OHBD’s Leadership Focus Creates Our Newest Leaders

Ellenore Angelidis — Thu, 27 May 2021 02:43:02 +0000

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 team in Addis, Dr. Worku Mulat, Yoseph Ayalew, and Netsanet Kassahun. We were honored to have a…

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Why Do I Volunteer for OHBD? From our Creative Lead, Author Jane Kurtz

Ellenore Angelidis — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 05:53:59 +0000

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 work brings joy. In more than twenty years of volunteering for literacy efforts…

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My Amazing Trip to Ethiopia

Ellenore Angelidis — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 05:32:45 +0000

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 water by taking three empty plastic bottles and filling them with salt water. The first had no salt in…

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OHBD Board Member, Threads Founder, Kara Valentine Shares Women’s Impact & a GREAT DEAL!!

Ellenore Angelidis — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 20:23:11 +0000

In September of 2015, I had the pleasure of connecting with Ellenore. Our work with our then corporate jobs initially brought us together but our shared passion for creating opportunities for women and children in Ethiopia (and beyond) kept us working in partnership over the last 6 years. I was honored to be offered a position on the Open Hearts Big Dreams Fund Board and we have collaborated on…

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