by Zev Lowe

Part 2 of the Dr. Robert Ouko Memorial Community Library launch at the Menara Primary School in Kenya that includes the Worldreader Kit of 46 Kindles.

Prior to the successful community launch and the following day, Worldreader kicked off our teacher training program. In addition to showing teachers how to use e-readers in their classrooms, our program involves empowering the project manager to train the teachers, and in turn, the teachers to train their own students. The enthusiasm and willingness of the teachers was immediately seen.

Richard Oketch (pictured above) is the brand-new project manager at Ouko Memorial Library/Menara School. He’ll be administering the Worldreader program, and generally focusing on improving the quality of teaching at the school. He’s got an impressive background — most recently, he left his native Kenya to get a Masters in Applied Linguistics at Kwongwon National University in South Korea. He also taught English there, and he’s clearly a passionate reader with a particular fondness for Chinua Achebe’s books.

The teachers were really excited to read, and asked if they could take the e-readers home with them for the weekend. They wanted to be extra familiar with the devices before starting school with them on Monday. They had already been told about the care and feeding of their devices, so the response was, “of course, you should take them home as much as possible.” It’s great to work with partners who share our firm belief – as stated in the World Bank’s recent blog post on us –  that technology and books are no good unless they are being used.

 

Dani, our digital publishing manager, spent a good amount of time working with not just Richard, but also Tom, the headmaster of the school. Tom said that after teacher training, he could see a visible increase in the confidence and pride that his teachers exuded when they stood in front of their classes.

 

Felix, one of the younger teachers at the school, was utterly delighted when he learned that the Kindle would read stories to him. The teachers were catching on fairly quickly, so we got to go over some more advanced features of the Kindle 3, like text-to-speech, creating collections, and rotating the screen.

Teacher Karen seemed to be engrossed in a book. It was hard to tear the teachers away from wanting to read the books, so we could get through the training material. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine a better problem to have. It’s great that they’re going to be able to take the devices home and I can’t wait to learn what they think of the books. The sponsoring organizations of this project, the Ouko Memorial Library and the Gordon family/friends, are already thinking about which of Worldreader’s many books for grown-ups they might want to offer to their teachers for their leisure reading and personal development.

 

Jenn, Worldreader’s content manager, gave a few teachers some tips on how to navigate their e-readers.

But mostly, the teachers helped each other figure things out, and soon they were ready to take a shot at training their own students!

More to come tomorrow on the student training. Stay tuned.

by Zev Lowe

Background: This is a Worldreader Kit of 46 Kindles in a school in Kenya that we are launching with the Dr. Robert Ouko Memorial Community Library at the Menara Primary School.  It is funded by the Gordons and their family/friends.

The launch event was pretty grand. They had erected tents for the occasion (which they also did at the HUMBLE launch in Uganda). Tents may look like nothing to us, but they cost a lot, and are typically used for weddings and funerals, so this was a big deal. Also, look at the number of chairs that were available, and how the front row guests got extra-comfortable seats. These are all significant details that signal how big this occasion was. And indeed, it was huge. Just look at the turnout! In the next picture, the section on the left was for teachers, elders, chiefs, sponsors, Worldreader etc. The long trailing section not entirely covered by the tent is for parents.

Same view from the back. The microphone and speakers came in a green box with plywood sides on castor wheels, which reminded me a little bit of a charging station.

The kids sat on the classroom stoop and watched from across the way.

I arrived late from Nairobi despite leaving at 5:30am, thanks to three flat tires (yes, only one short of a full house), a closed road, and a lengthy forced detour. That meant I missed the kids singing and the flag raising. When I showed up, the village chief (whom I had initially assumed was a police officer) was talking. He spoke about safety of e-readers and then gave everybody his mobile phone number (twice) so that we could all him in case of any difficulties.

This is Mama Christabel, the late Dr. Ouko’s wife. The library is in his honor, and the school it serves is one that she has known for years and years. Mama is super well-respected in the community, and she has been a wonderful host to the whole Worldreader team, putting us up in her homestead, feeding us delicious hot meals, and otherwise pampering us while we’re in town.

David and Shadrack Lemiso came to represent The Kilgoris Project and Ntimigom School. Shadrack eagerly presented himself as “your elders, because we had e-readers first, but now we are no longer lonely because you are following in our footsteps.”

Lots of parents showed up- I noticed one father couldn’t stop beaming.

After the official event concluded, parents gathered around the table to check out these e-reader devices with all the local and international books on them. Exclamations of delight ensued- it was another successful launch (Interested in reading about an earlier community launch in Ghana?  Click here to travel back in time to December 2010)

By Elizabeth Hensick Wood

I just returned from a whirlwind four day trip to Nairobi; my mission to partner with more Kenyan publishers and get more great local books for Worldreader students.

On the relaxing Swiss Air flight out, in between sobbing over “The Descendants” and giggling over “Tower Heist”, I jotted down my goals for the trip.  I decided that if I could sign two new publishers and get 100 new e-books, the trip would have been a huge success. This goal was not set lightly.  I knew what it was to bang on local publishers’ doors and ask for their books.  I’d done it in Ghana, and I’d done it a year ago in Kenya – it had never been an easy task.  But what I grossly underestimated was the power of what Worldreader had accomplished over the past year – and how much easier that was going to make things for me.

A year ago when Colin and I sat across from Kenyan publishers, Worldreader had been working for only 6 months in Ghana – and we had yet to launch our program in Kenya.  We had big ideas of where we were going – but no real solid evidence that our grand scheme was going to work.  Now, a year later, I’m was about to sit across from publishers with a wealth of stories, pictures, videos and hard data proving success from 18 months in Ghana, almost 1 year in Kenya, a project that just launched in Uganda and a second project in Kenya launching next week.  Let’s just say that kind of momentum grabs people’s attention.

Over the four days I met with the Managing Directors of some of Kenya’s largest educational publishers including the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, and Moran (formally Macmillan).  I met with the Chairman of the Kenya Publisher’s Association, Lawrence Njagi, who is also Managing Director of Mountain Top Publishers. I had Lawrence from “hello” – he’s a visionary who is now an important ally.  I had breakfast with John Mwazemba, CEO of Phoenix Publishers (and young enough to be my son!)  And I finally had the immense pleasure of meeting Angela Wachuka, Executive Director of the widely acclaimed Kwani Trust.

Out of the 7 new publishers I met, I got an immediate “yes” from 6, resulting in around 160 new ebooks with many more to follow.  Numbers aside—it was a meeting of minds.   In every case, our vision and passion is shared and thanks to these partners our capacity for changing the world increases a hundred-fold.

I also got to spend time with our current publishing partners.  Susan Carvalho, head of the super creative boutique Jacaranda Designs, and I had a delicious BBQ chicken lunch at the Nairobi National Museum.  I spent 3 hours with Janet Njoroge, MD of Longhorn and her forward thinking team.  And I finally got to meet Aleya Jamal and the Story Moja gang.  These pioneering publishers have a special place in my heart– even a year ago, they saw the potential of our vision and joined us.

On the trip home, which was the antithesis of the relaxing Swiss flight out (more on this in a sec.), I measured the success of the trip.  The math goes something like this: 7 new publishers + 3 super passionate current publishers + 160 new e-books!  But, wait, more numbers: 1 missed flight – 2 hour airport blackout – 3 declined credit cards -1 vintage 1970s Turkish Air Airbus departing at 4 am = MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

By Tina Tam and Joseph Botwey

Meet Daniel Owusu, a 14-year-old junior high school student in Worldreader’s iREAD program. Daniel lives with his family on a farm in the tropical forest near the village, which makes for a long walk to school. He is the only one of the six children in his family to have a Kindle, and he loves it with passion. According to his grandmother, Daniel often gets so immersed in his reading that he does not hear when they call him for food. Daniel wants to become a doctor.

Daniel was one of the 25 students who earned $8 of Kindle bookstore credit through their excellent attendance in iREAD Vacation School. Daniel used the credit to buy Dusk World, an interactive book, which incidentally is a popular category among iREAD students. Daniel had also downloaded the trial audio version of Steve Job’s biography. He told us that The Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osborne is his favorite, and when our star volunteer Carl visited Daniel showed him his collection of all 44 titles. He is currently on book five, and plans to finish all of them.

Now, you might be wondering: What did other students buy?  Their interests are diverse.  Some primary students downloaded titles like Snug as a Bug (I Can Read!) and Big Egg (Step into Reading), while junior high students downloaded stories like Toward the Goal: The Kaka Story and The Hunger Games. There was also practical active content like Easy Calculator and The Periodic Table of the Elements, and fun ones like Word Search.

These findings help us provide books that suit the preferences of Daniel and all his friends and also come up with recommendations for them to download. But we know they’re already doing a good job on their own. When Joseph (operations manager in Ghana) first announced the winners of Vacation School, some of the students quickly pulled up their wish lists and went hunting for good reads with help from their parents, teachers, and friends. Jacqueline, a primary school teacher in iREAD, said: “I haven’t seen students so absorbed in their books like this before. I’ve hardly seen students discussing or recommending a book.”

No wonder teachers and students were excited to find out about the incentive card program. We’ll tell you more about that in Part 2.

Sometimes it’s important to step back and remember that Worldreader is about reading. We are not ‘the e-reader NGO’, nor ‘the Kindle guys’. We are simply ‘the folks who are transforming reading.’

Our core mission is to enable folks all over the developing world to read.  We do that by using new technology to deliver thousands of books to those who previously had few to no books.

For the past two years, we have been doing this using 3G enabled e-readers (the amazing Amazon Kindle) in schools in Ghana and Kenya.  We have proven that if you give the right books to folks – relevant, local books – they will read more, and read better.

Last year Worldreader began to investigate the development of a book app for mobile phones – as just another way to deliver more books to more people.  Mobile penetration across the developing world is skyrocketing and in many African countries, including Ghana, has reached over 80%.

By cosmic coincidence, on the other side of the globe in Sydney, a small start up called biNu was developing a new technology that turns low-end feature phones into smart phones.  Thanks to biNu, the 4 billion people around the world with low end phones, can enjoy instant access to news, Facebook, Twitter…. and books. 

As a passion project, biNu’s Joe Lipson developed a book reader app to run on the biNu platform. biNu’s CEO, Gour Lentell then reached out to Worldreader and generously offered to let us take the app and make it better by procuring great locally relevant content that will hook folks on reading.  And so is born the Worldreader App (beta).

Will the Worldreader App be a way for millions of people in the developing world to enjoy books? We hope so, and we intend to find out.  Stay tuned.

It’s another big week for Worldreader: We officially kicked off a new program in Uganda!

We mentioned our Partner Program and  expansion plans a while back, and soon we’ll have more news about what’s happening and where we’re going next. Exciting stuff in the pipeline!

In the meantime, here are a few photos and a near real-time live feed from the ground. Worldreader’s Tina Tam and Dani Zacarias were at Humble United Methodist School, where Kindles and e-books got teachers and kids giggling with book love.

Quotes that made us smile:

Dave Norman, a member of the school management committee and pastor at the Crossroads United Methodist Church, the Asburn, Va. organization sponsoring the school: ”What Worldreader has done is to empower the teachers and students to teach one and other…so we’re very honored to [be working] with Worldreader because we believe that’s the way that things really change… you’re empowered. You don’t need us. Worldreader is great because it expands your horizon… you have access to a whole world of books.”

Esther, the headmistress at the school: “I believe we’ve been given a gold gift. What other gift is better than the gift to help you further your education?”

Charles, a teacher: “When I used the e-reader I came across the story of the life of Obama. When he was a elementary school child he said he wanted to become President. When reading about such things, I want you to think about what you will become.”

Since we’ve chatting this up on Facebook and Twitter, we thought it would be worth creating a timeline of the kick-off. Here are the pre-launch story and the one from this week.

 

 

By Jennifer Baljko

We started this series last spring to spotlight authors who believed in the same thing we do: Reading has the power to transform lives. Since then, we’ve been engaging with many authors and are happily surprised by their generosity and support.

It’s great to see our author community expand, but often, too, we like to pause and think of our earliest fans. Kofi Okyere comes immediately to mind.

Kofi, a Ghanaian author living in Arizona, was one of the first authors to see the good in Worldreader’s “Books for all” goal. He made To Catch a Monkey (The Coconut Years) available to our kids, and recently donated a second title, his latest book Cabo Corso.

We caught up with Kofi a few weeks ago and chatted about his involvement with Worldreader, his perspective about Ghana’s development and emphasis on education, and, of course, the books that inspire him. Here are excerpts of that conversation.

WR: How did you get involved with Worldreader? How did that connection happen?

Kofi: There are Twitter chat groups — #kidlitchat and #fridayreads – where people in education and publishing meet and discuss projects. That is where Clare, my wife and manager, heard about Worldreader and first interacted with Elizabeth [Worldreader's director of digital publishing].

As the conversation continued, we found out Worldreader had just finished a test pilot in Spain and was heading to Ghana. Elizabeth asked if we would be interested in participating. We said, ‘Yes, of course. We would love to be a part of this.’ That’s something we’ve been trying to do on a smaller scale here in Phoenix, to get more kids reading. And, giving back to the kids at home has always been important to me.

Every once in a while I check the Worldreader website, and I’m just amazed at how much has been accomplished from last year to this year. It’s a brilliant idea, and it’s nice to see brilliant ideas moving forward so quickly.

WR: Tell us a little bit about your background and ties to Ghana.

Kofi: I was born in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region, but my parents and family now live in Accra. I went to primary school in East Africa, in Ethiopia, because my parents worked for the United Nations and that was our home base for a while. We moved back to Ghana when I was 12 years old, and I went to secondary school in Cape Coast. I did my national service in Ghana, moved to Arizona for university, and have been here since. I try to go back to Ghana once or twice a year, and stay connected with the community there.

Every time I go back, there seems to be so much more advancement and development, which is really exciting. Over the last few years, we had so much brain drain and many people left Ghana to look for greener pastures. But, now with the way the country is developing, the amenities and services are increasing and improving, and more people want to stay there. That makes me happy because it means maybe the younger generation will want to stay and improve the country even more.

One day when my kids are older [he has two boys, ages 13 and 11], I’d like to relocate back to Ghana or spend a greater portion of my time there.

WR: What would you like to do there? How do see Ghana progressing?

Kofi: Clare and I have talked about how we could promote literacy in Ghana and get kids reading more. That’s part of why I was interested in Worldreader’s work.

It boils down to two things: your ability to read and to do math. That’s the foundation for everything. Reading can take you everywhere in the world. It opens your imagination, and when you read books set in different places, you learn about different cultures and ways of life. This is especially important for kids in rural areas who don’t have access to books or libraries.

One thing I love about Ghana is that, as a former British colony, education has always been emphasized. It’s very important for people there. But, it’s one thing to stress the importance of education and another thing to have the resources to support it. Even though the Ministry in Education is doing a lot, the rural areas simply don’t have enough funding or supplies to go further.

In many areas back home, you have to pay for school. It’s not government-funded. You often have families pooling their money so at least a few kids can go to school, get an education, and help support the family later on. Generally, though, people see education — and reading — as a way to better themselves and the country as a whole.

What Worldreader does for kids, especially the younger ones, is expose them to so much more by giving them resources to access information and books. This will encourage the kids to reach for the stars and make a difference.

WR: And, now for the big question of the day. What book made you fall in love with reading?

Kofi: My earliest memory when it comes to reading is linked to Bingham Academy in Ethiopia. The librarian would read to us every day, and one day she started The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. We were a rowdy bunch or third or fourth graders, and we all just sat there quietly and listened to her read. I loved the way she read and the intonation of her voice. She carried us to faraway places.

When I started to read on my own, the books that captivated me were Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines. In fact, re-read King Solomon’s Mines a few months ago, and read it almost every year. I read different versions of it. It connects me to my childhood, and I enjoy that. I finally convinced my kids to read it too. I recommend lots of books to my kids, but they usually shrug me off and say ‘Oh Dad, that book is so old. I don’t want to read that.’ But, my older son finally read it and said, ‘You know what, Dad? That book was really good.’

Thanks for the chat, Kofi. Follow Kofi on Twitter at @2911ent.

***

People like Kofi, Chika Unigwe, Meshack Asare, Ellen Banda-Aaku, and other African and international authors are making a big difference in the lives of our kids. They enthusiastically support Worldreader by donating their books, short stories, and personal essays.

Worldreader fans, we hope you’ll give these authors some love. Check out Kofi’s books, To Catch a Monkey (The Coconut Years) and Cabo Corso, or browse our growing list of participating authors and publishers.

If you’re an author and would like to get involved, contact our Director of Digital Publishing Elizabeth Wood at publishing@worldreader.org. You’ll also find her on Twitter at @lizzywood.

By Jennifer Baljko

As a lean, nonprofit social enterprise, much of what we do is powered by the enthusiasm of our volunteers.

Now and again, Worldreader shines a light on their initiative, shares their on-the-ground experience with our broader community, and gives them a big public hug. You may remember, Sara Rhyne, for instance. She won our video contest last year, and was instrumental in helping with our Kenya launch in partnership with The Kilgoris Project.

This time, we want to say thanks to another star volunteer, Carl Hinrichsen (twitter: @carlhinrichsen). Carl comes to us via ESADE Business School and brings with him know-how from the mobile sector, as well as from working at Amazon’s European Kindle Team.  He volunteered to help us sort out some e-reader connectivity issues we’ve been having in the field, and without hesitation, he put himself on a plane to Ghana to see what’s going on first-hand. Besides getting down to technical details about why some e-readers sometimes behave differently, he’s fundraising to cover his expenses and sending up daily news via his blog and twitter stream.

Here are a few things that have us in awe with Carl back in our Barcelona office and excerpts from his blog:

1. His knack for trouble-shooting and encouraging kids to use built-in features on their Kindles:

“I suggested they tried out the ‘text to speech feature’ one day, a function of the Kindle Keyboard, which reads out a book’s content with a computer voice. Stephen’s [A Worldreader student] opinion: ‘The e-readers are great to read by yourself, but sharing and using them together with someone makes you enjoy them even more.’”

2. The connection he’s building with Worldreader’s students and families:

“We went on to visit Mabel and her family, a smaller but equally welcoming family, consisting of Mabel, her parents, her sister Millicent and her baby brother Abdel-Asis. Mabel’s father is a cab driver, while the mother stays at home to take care of the family. Both Mabel and Millicent have an e-reader, and they are often seen reading together outside of their house. Their mother had become a great supporter of Worldreader’s work and reported how both children had improved at school and in speaking English. They did indeed speak good English, particularly Millicent spoke great English for a primary school student, benefiting from the being in the e-reader class, and reading at home with her elder sister. Together with Diana [another Worldreader student], we read another of their favorite books on the e-reader: Ananse and the Pot of Wisdom.”

3. His keen observation and the questions he asks:

“Towards the end of our chat I asked if he had any suggestions for improvements. ‘Reading Lights,’ he suggested, ‘So students can read at night. And e-readers for all the other classes as well, so people don’t constantly come and want to borrow ours.’”

Carl, thanks for rolling up your sleeves and diving in.

Soon, we’ll be announcing other ways folks like you can get involved with Worldreader. In the meantime, follow Carl’s adventures in Ghana, give him hat-tip on Twitter, or help him help us bring “Books for all.”

 

 

By Jennifer Baljko 

Worldreader recently spoke with Chika Unigwe, a Nigerian-born author now living in Belgium. We talked about the books she read as a child, writers who influenced her life, her early attempts at getting published, and the gift reading gives all of us. Here are excerpts of our Skype chat.

WR: What book made you fall in love with reading? Changed your life?

Chika: When I was about nine years old, I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It was the first novel I read. I loved the novelty of it. I felt thoroughly grown up. I grew up with four sisters so the March girls seemed very familiar, and my father was away a lot like theirs. I could empathize on a lot of levels.

WR: Who gave you the book? Where did you find it?

Chika: A “social” aunt. I called her aunty but we were not related. When I was eight years old, she came to my primary school looking for a kid to co-host a radio show with her in Enugu in southeastern Nigeria. She wanted someone to read music requests from listeners. I was recommended to her. She took me under her wing, and our show was a success. We forged a beautiful relationship. She’s a big movie star in Nigeria now. Her name is Patience Ozokwor.

WR: Does she know about your success?

Chika: I hope so.  :-0

WR: How did you feel reading Little Women? How did it impact you?

Chika: For starters, it got me hooked on novels. I think that the first novel I read encouraged me to continue. I read everything because all my siblings had different reading tastes and my parents catered to all of them. I read my brothers’ James Hadley Chase and Robert Ludlum books, my sisters’ Mills and Boon and Harlequin romances, and discovered what my preferred genre was.

But, more importantly it made me realize that we shared — despite our differences — a common humanity.

WR: Did being an avid reader influence your decision to be a writer?

Chika: I am sure reading had an impact on it, but when I was much, much younger, five or so, I had a classmate whose mother was a writer, Flora Nwapa. She was the first African woman to be published in the U.K. She was published in 1962, four years after [Chinua] Achebe. Her first novel is called Efuru. Flora also started a publishing house in the ’80s and published lots of children’s picture books and storybooks.

She’d bring us books to keep us busy while waiting for our parents to fetch us after school or while she had a quick chat with our teacher. Before then, the only storybooks I had read were Enid Blyton’s. I was fascinated by Flora.

WR: Why? What fascinated you?

Chika: The fact that she was a writer. I had never considered it as a career option because on career days in kindergarten they told us about all the traditional jobs — doctor, lawyer, teacher, regular professions.

Flora was refreshingly different, and I wanted to be like her.

When I was 13, I got her phone number and called her to pitch a novel I had written. It was about a couple who got separated on their wedding day — the man dies in a car accident –and, after years of unhappiness, the bride finds love unexpectedly again

WR: What did Flora say? Was it published?

Chika: No. I called Flora. She was very nice and asked me to bring it in. But I needed my dad’s driver to take me to the publishing house. Somehow I never managed to go and I had to go back to boarding school. By the time I came back, I didn’t want to pursue it anymore. I wanted to write something else.

I wrote a play the next year. I sent it to a television station. They sent me a nice rejection letter. 

WR: You were very lucky to have these kinds of people in your life and to have access to so many books. Why do think it’s important for kids the world over – but especially in Africa – to have access to books or e-books?

Chika:  I think it is important for kids– all kids– to have access to books, but in places where books are not easily available or affordable, e-books make a lot of sense.

Books and stories help us get a perspective on just how small we are, on the common denominators we share even in our differences, and on how there are no absolutes. They help create a sense of empathy and understanding.

When I think of the importance of reading and discovering worlds beyond our own, I think of a poem we learned by heart in primary school: The blind men and the elephant.

These six blind men try to describe an elephant simply by touching it. Depending on what part of the body they touched, they came up with a different description. One touches the side and declares this elephant is very like a wall. Another touches the tusk and declares it’s like a spear. They are all right, of course, but their rightness is only one part of the true story, and they each stick to their versions of rightness, which, while not being wrong, is only one version.

[Reading shows] that your version of the truth is yours, and you can’t push it down on others whose version is different. [It also teaches us] that there are many ways of doing things and yours isn’t necessarily the better one. It’s just different.

WR: What are you reading now?

Chika: Edward Rutherfurd’s London. London is a novel in parts about London from 54 B.C. to the 1990s. And a novel by Siri Huvset called Blindfold, and Teju Cole’s Open City.

Thanks for the chat, Chika!

***

Chika, who has written the well-received novel On Black Sisters’ Street, has donated a collection of short stories to our program.

People like Chika, Meshack Asare, Ellen Banda-Aaku, and other African and international authors are making a big difference in the lives of our kids. They enthusiastically support Worldreader’s “Books for all” goal by donating their books, short stories, and personal essays.

We hope you’ll give these great authors some love, too. Check out our growing list of participating authors and publishers.

If you’re an author and would like to get involved, contact our Director of Digital Publishing Elizabeth Wood at publishing@worldreader.org. You’ll also find her on Twitter at @lizzywood.

by David Risher

All non-profit enterprises raise funds. It comes with the territory. After all, if an organization could pay all its bills by selling its services at a profit, it should probably do so and allow Adam’s Smith’s invisible hand to do the heavy lifting.

People in our field sometimes complain about having to raise funds.  And to be sure, it is no substitute for reading with children in our program, or helping publishers donate e-books, or building an extraordinary team. But it turns out that fundraising can also be fun.  That’s because it’s really an opportunity to engage with interesting experienced people and share ideas with them.  This is just as true for smaller donors as for major donors: even $20 donations (which is enough to buy 5 e-books) are often accompanied by a question, a suggestion, or simply a life-affirming expression of gratitude.

Here are a few examples– let’s call it “The Story of Bill, Shel, and Brendan.”

The Bill is William Draper. Here is a bit of wonderful holiday news: on Tuesday, The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation awarded Worldreader a three-year grant, and named me a DRK Foundation Social Entrepreneur.   This is huge: we were one of only six grantees, out of thousands of requests and proposals they receive each year.  We are humbled to be part of the group that funded the entrepreneurs behind Kiva, Room to Read, Vision Spring, and many other first-tier  social enterprises.

The financial support from the DRK will directly help us get thousands of kids reading in some of the world’s poorest countries.  But even more important is the expertise that Bill’s team bring on what it takes to effect large-scale change.  The questions that Anne Marie Burgoyne, Breanna DiGiammarino, and the rest of the team asked during our application process have already sharpened our thinking immensely, and we’re deeply appreciative.

(By the way, what is it about people named Bill?  We’ve already written about this Bill, and this Bill was kind enough to Tweet about our work to his 35,000 followers last week.  Wow!!  If you are reading this and your name is Bill, please contact us immediately )

Shel is Shel Kaphan, and his Kaphan Foundation yesterday also gave Worldreader a generous grant.  (Yesterday was a big day for us!)  Shel was Amazon’s first employee, and those of you who know him know he’s kind of a natural-born skeptic.  Shel and his partner Ericka asked great questions as they kicked Worldreader’s tires fairly well, which makes their endorsement even more gratifying.  We look forward to working with them for many years, both on our Sub-Saharan Africa work and in the future in Latin American.

And Brendan is Brendan Williams, who made a donation through our website in the name of the SMS 7th Grade Teachers.  We didn’t know Brendan directly, but his generosity will help bring more books to children in Ghana and Kenya while it acknowledges teachers in his own life.  We’d love everyone who likes our work to follow Brandon’s lead!

Brendan, Bill, Shel, have helped Worldreader immensely this year as we’ve brought more e-books to more children, and we appreciate every one of you who have  followed our progress.  The secret to keeping fund-raising fun is knowing that  each person helps shape and refine our thinking, challenging us to think even bigger or faster or just plain different… and along the way, reaffirms our belief in the generosity of all.

Huge thanks to all our funders and other partners, and Happy Holidays to all from all of us at Worldreader!