Our Story

"For these children, for all of us, the stories inside books are more than a gentle escape. They are a life raft."   -Pam Allyn

My grandmother's stories surge through me like their own kind of life force. My father's and mother's and uncles' and aunts' stories of their childhoods together remind me every day why family matters so much.

Those stories, all of them, link directly to the story of a little girl named Diana who lives in a place called Kibera, a gigantic slum in Kenya the size of Central Park, with more children who have been orphaned by the HIV/AIDS virus than one's worst imaginings can think possible. Diana is ten now. She was seven when LitWorld was born, a wispy girl with sorrowful eyes and one photograph of her dead mother, carried in the pocket of her dress.

I met Diana during the first year of teacher leadership training that LitWorld did for a remarkable friend, the great teacher and educational leader Ken Okoth. Ken leads the Children of Kibera Foundation. He wanted to know if it would be possible to bring the teacher training techniques I had developed with LitLife to his school, Red Rose. My friend, the inspirational Kimmie Weeks, made me a second invitation within weeks of Ken's to come to Liberia, his war-torn homeland, and help him rebuild the sense of peace and hope through education.

I knew that all along, the work I had been doing, first in urban New York schools, then by creating Books for Boys at Children's Village in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and then by spreading our teacher training across the US through LitLife, had been growing towards this very question. I had all along been striving to be fully prepared for the work to begin to get bigger, to draw in every child on earth to this one question, the question that will drive me for the rest of my life: "What if every child in the world could read and write?"

Diana, in Kibera, deserves happiness. Her life is very, very hard. She loves children's books and feels for them deeply. She is wise and kind. She is, in spite of all the sorrow she has experienced, a deeply happy person. I think we underestimate this ability to choose joy. When I spend time with children like Diana, I realize they are absorbing the world and have the capacity to change it, if only we allow them the opportunity. Diana will be our guide. She told me: "By next year, I won't be here at school anymore. Most girls in Kibera do not go to school past the age of ten."

Diana has called us all to the next leg of our journey. Education, and literacy especially, are the human rights issues of our time. We all must work as hard as we can to make sure Diana has the right to go to school and to learn to read and write so her stories are part of the fabric of the world as we know it.

This is just the beginning of the LitWorld story, our Girls Clubs, our teacher initiatives and our LitCorps, but I hope it is a new once upon a time. Once upon a time, every child on earth told stories, wrote stories and read stories. Then the world sang with joy.

We welcome you to become a part of this story with us.