i would like to fake to take a moment to thank all the volunteers that are here because without then we couldn't do any of  desserts out there and if you case you didn't know this evening we have a dessert dash it's quite simple there's a she in the middle of your table and in it each person can put him out to donate then you elect to captain the captain tallies up the totals and chooses a runner ok when it is time we'll start reading off the table numbers in order of who donated the most and then your runner has to dash to get dessert i'd like to take i'd like to emphasize dash because if you don't hurry you might miss out on the dessert of your choice i'd also like to thank our sponsors who donated thousand dollars or more amount like to thank our silver sponsors who donate five hundred dollars or more and all of our other other donors we really appreciate  and all of our table captains who purchased a table for us thank you very much day when the cob and spray we wait for the banquet and wonder banks when i'm from the country where the pain is where from one moment the rain drips one country one world one language big dream little girls braiding imagination from their feet to their hairlines a place where you could see a child time sucking thirteen months the sun sun from empty sky limes how can we know not provide for those who ask for los so is little when we constantly beg for so caring postage stamps and ten buckets so they can to love letters on the throat of a dormant god who does not wish to respond a young child so dark and tall you've been mistaken for a team his dream is not in the n b a but food for the next day and with a body were not broken like a promise his eyelashes outstretched arms waiting to grasp the world as if to say examine the archaeological remains because with an ongoing civil war that is far from simple lucy is not the only the first question a human being laughed a web slept temper the only nation there resembles a crooked heart trying escape or self to the nearest body of water the only live and i claim citizenship without a visa or any regrets so forget american express it never leave home without it have gone had she been literate with her charisma and her stary storytelling prowess her generosity and optimism there's no doubt in my mind that she would have been a leader a community activist an inspirational speaker and she certainly would have been an author of some amazing stories when we were in the refugee camps my mother would often ask me to read letters to her from her family i used to wonder why she wanted to hear the same things read to her over and over again i later realize she just wanted me to practice reading and that was all she had to offer me and after we had immigrated to the us she would ask me to read to her more letters from our family and she would dictate letters that i needed to write for her thirty six years later i still know how to read and write to her and that was the only training i had aside from learning my my mother had laid down the foundation for learning for me fast forward to a few months ago someone on the microsoft network where i work asked for volunteers to help translate children's books from english to to  e mediately became protective of my time and began to file that email and that no time for this just donate money and walk away folder but something about children's books into green it caught my eye and t heart i never saw children's books on my in my language when i was growing up in fact i never saw any children's books until was nine years old why because they didn't exist in the refugee camps but at nine i was a new immigrant attending jackson elementary school in lubbock texas i had all the children's books that my heart desired at my fingertips access to children's books accelerated my reading fluency within a few months i had learned written and spoken english in the school library couldn't keep up with my reading appetite i was nonstop from there that story hungry refugee little girl raised by an amazing mother ended up graduating from stanford university and stands before you tonight i have no doubt in my mind that access to oral stories and to printed stories with pictures has a magical impact on children that is why i support open heart big open hearts big dreams i believe in the power of the service they provide oh each baby has opened my heart and i hope it does the same for you wow just wow i was one of promise my kids i'm not going to cry when i'm up here but i can't seem to ever manage to keep that one it's really hard to imagine never learning to read i think it's even more hard to imagine learning to read without holding a book but that's true for many kids in the world and that's why we're here today want to take you back to last year last year it was december two thousand and seventeen which is lost my dad and my mom got cancer it's really hard here for the family but coming together and doing something for kids is very healing and we have really good news my mom's doing great thank you and my dad who was an avid lifelong reader including reading to his grandkids i'm sure is really proud of her and of the efforts here today the picture on the left is the last time we were here at the northwest african american museum the very first year of open arts big dreams believe it or not that is your fill in m reading to his little sister and i think we can safely say we have all grown up just a little before we jump into talking about ready set go books which is by far biggest and most ambitious project i wanted to take a couple moments to talk about some of our other pilot model programs for us model programs are areas where we identify a gap or we see an innovative approach that we have fit in we have vast funds and expertise we can greatly scale the impact and to are really proud to share that we participated in this year is a girls coding camp for six weeks in this and as you can imagine from hearing omas you know lots of girls may not get to chance to go to school much less learn about technology and we know how important technology is and the second it is transition scholarships for deserving high schoolers that have one last hurdle before they can attend a local university and the coding class we did wit amazing organization and i know we have some of the members here so thank you and project ethiopia whose executive director is here sue wilcox so please give them around we're excited to expand both those next year set go books has bennett adventure and adventure in so many different ways it really is amazing where reading can take you so the ready set go book projects really has two pieces there's creating  publishing the books and our team has created forty five titles that are published on amazon available in the us and the rest of north america as well as year up in print on demand and digital formats we actually also have our own author page which i don't know about you but that really is thrilling for me and we also are proud to share that the seattle public libraries are carrying our books and are looking to carry all the new ones coming forward and the second piece which the creative team sets out for us is the digital files that actually need to get printed in ethiopia and if you look at our books our colorful if you had a chance to hang out with the book team they like they catch your eye and that is by design they also are full of details about ethiopia we want kids to see themselves in these books and there even for the youngest reader or the newest reader who actually may be a grown up so after we create and publish the books the adventure does not end as malcolm here can can attest from ethiopia reads the goal is to get those books in the hands of kids in ethiopia so another one of our model programs was with print locally and distribute to libraries and schools in ethiopia and we're really proud to share that thus far this year we have printed and distributed seventy thousand copies  in four different languages including one in the south where it's the first time that those individuals got to see their language in print to which is just amazing and we have exciting news that by the end of the year we will hit the goal of one hundred thousand books for two thousand and eighteen but that's not enough like we're it's great and we're proud but there's three million first graders in ethiopia they all deserve books so for two thousand and nineteen our goals are similar we need to create more books we have a goal to create fifty unique titles in two thousand and nineteen in two thousand and eighteen we had forty five but many of them were in progress this will be fifty from scratch we also need to print and distribute more books and our goal is at least one hundred thousand additional books printed and distributed in various ethiopian languages as well as training the teachers if you've never had books before you don't know how to use books when you're teaching the kids to read their kids who've never held a book in their hand we can change that but we can't do it alone we need help so we have these goals and asking you to come with us on this adventure we have a focus on getting more ethiopian illustrators authors and artists if you know those you know where to find me we want to train more teachers and ultimately create a reading and writing children's book culture in ethiopia and maybe a tr our team somebody asked me to have a really big team know we have a small team of what we like to call ordinary people just regular folks people like you and me and everybody in the room but we believe we can do extraordinary and we have a number of the book team in the room so i want to take a moment to recognize some of them but before i do that i would like to let you know at least three hundred different individuals helped create those books they were kids they were artists they're illustrators they were translators they were authors and today we have with us our three creative directors they're kind of keep it in the family jane kurtz caroline kurtz and candy rasmussen they will stand for a moment the production side is led by an ex microsoft program manager because everybody needs a program manager right she's not with us today but kate baer who is part of the production team is and so i ask her to stay  and then i would like anyone in the room who has authored illustrated proof read contributed some way they're ready set go books if you could just stand for a moment so we can thank you and some of the places that created the book so with that we will play  video for the show that adults and kids reading together make learning to read go faster the problem in ethiopia has been that children are drilled on the alphabet and then all they have to read out their textbooks they never have anything to use to practice reading during the women distribution i watched educators sound out the words on the covers of the books one of the men turned to me in astonishment and said it says count for me rain in ethiopia i've had a thrill getting to see ready set go books distributed in several different european languages i've also watched children react to the ready set books they're drawn to them like magnets colorful pictures that show familiar life around them in ethiopia words that make sense after their slowly sounded out because those words are in their language short sentences that don't feel intimidating these things draw children into reading right now know about three million first graders and you are taught to read with no books to practice that reading skill together we can change that joined us for one of the biggest adventures on is this young lady now i can say little girl anymore because she's grown up on me and she'd like to say a few words yes she's got the eyes she'd like to say a few words to you today so like i said last year you the volunteers and you know it's a great cause i know there's many many great causes in this world and we're in tough times that hopefully will get better the next couple years or until then we'll keep plugging along going beyond that and once again thank you all so very much for b just one last public service announcement if you want your things will be ready for you at checkout to am a heartfelt thank you from everyone here you're welcome to stay for a few minutes and mingle but thank you all i am here here check out i am should be in the front well i'm on the advisory board there but i am a co founder of the lib only academy and i'm the executive director of it even though it's an artist and gave us a very generous screen to run a coding came for girls this summer i'm the creative director of the book project so i'm a children's book writer and i have written books for publishers here in the united states i really wanted to create some books for children in ethiopia since that's where i learned how to read and i am mostly the writer for a lot of the books but i've also been trying to draw in some other writers and then i try to find a lot of illustrators so that they can do the art to make my words come alive or sometimes people actually do the art first and then i look at their art that's how it happened with the gander books and i was telling you i actually saw the art that the children had created and then my sister and i wrote the text to go along with it and then i'm the one that looks at how the art and the books can go together how the words and the art go together and i kind of supervise the first digital team that figures out how to make the books digitally ready so i'm the i'm the head of the creative part and then we turn it over to a production team in seattle oh it's b d is an organization that i've been with which i've been involved for over seven years so usually i try to dawn it myself and help the organization raise funds and whenever i travel to ethiopia i take books with me and distribute them in ethiopia visit the libraries that the organization has built and so on and so forth i am one of the creative team for the and my sister and i mostly at this point we write the stories more than anything else last year we had a lot of work trying to figure out our systems this year we got the systems down  pretty well and especially with eleanor's work on systems with her team the production were a lot faster so that freed us up to do the creative work which is wonderful i'm in the advisory committee for it years building libraries training libraries and educators and providing books to children around with e o p in every part of the country well eleanor whom we all know in julie's she will member of our board on our school work with eleanor on amazon and he you know he got us connected because she was so interested she was at that time helping to raise funds for ethiopia reads and we knew about ethiopia reads also and so we all kind of got connected and our school when in fact at this very museum was her very first events i was remembering that and our whole board came and so we're very interested in supporting that and then when she founded b d as a separate organization she asked me to be on the advisory board well i've known eleanor for a long time because i was a volunteer with ethiopia reads for about twenty years so eleanor used to raise money for ethiopia reads and then when she decided to create her own nonprofit she talked to me about whether i had an idea of something that i would like to do that i hadn't had a chance to do yet and i said well i've been raising money for ethiopia reads but i've never gotten a chance to put on my creative hat and do something creative and she said i think that's a really good project for open hearts big dreams i got involved seven years ago when their organization together an event where we were raising funds for ethiopia reads then she continued to work with that organization for a long time and eventually as you know just started her own organization beauty well janus my sister and she and i created this idea it was her brainstorm it was her idea but she knew she didn't want to do it alone and she came to me and she told me her idea and i thought wow that sounds interesting that would be fun to do together and that's how we started reading was just part of my life and when i was a little girl my teacher rich parents and the have spoiled him and they never taught him anything they never showed him anything and they died and he didn't like school and they didn't worry about it and then they both died and then he was like penny less and he was struggling in life so wherever he went he when he saw children who are like true ones who are not going to school he would tell them i peace peace peace go to school i don't want you to be like me so that's really really was something which has left so much in me and i became an educator through my life um i'm a teacher i'm an artist so as a teacher you know reading is very important i also wrote a book and i always think about reading and writing is very important just like art so that got me reading involved because renault and she wrote historical fiction about ancient greek times and she was a big influence for me shelley wrote five books and i read them all so she was a big influence but i have always loved reading of course and as an educator of course we know it's the most important thing to get children and students involved in well i learned how to read in ethiopia my mom has not had an even finished college yet when she and my dad went to ethiopia to work but she was such an avid reader and that's how i learned to read and that's how my sisters and my brother and i learned to read was from watching our mother who loved books so her love of books rubbed off on me and my whole life really has been about books my grandchildren are ethiopian american their their mom is ethiopian and so she wasn't that used to the idea of reading with little kids but i watched her reading with with my grandkids and so i can see that ethiopians of a younger generation are starting to get that idea of how important books can be i was born and raised in ethiopia so i left  ethiopia when i was about eighteen years all and went to the sudan and became a refugee there and then i had an opportunity to come to us about thirty years ago and i drove a taxi cab here in seattle for five years and i put myself through school at the university of washington and then got a job at microsoft so i've been working at microsoft for twenty two years so i'm a drifter at microsoft by the way so speaking of books the first time actually i remember myself reading books with that the university of washington because but then when i was going to school in ethiopia england i don't even remember if we had a library literal reading books so i don't even remember merely being books so once i was exposed to the power of books as an adult at the university of washington then i started to think about how can i a but also they have changed my perspective and they have weighed in my view or about the world that we live in so that's that's i mean i can't even talk about it enough how books of my life oh my goodness janie and i were the two oldest in our family of seven children and we both became total bookworms at a very young age we were both we were both finishing our children's books at home in ethiopia where we learned to read at home we finished our children's books and we started in on the adult book shelves of our home at very young age at age twelve age ten we were reading our parents books and in some cases we got books taken away from us because they were not appropriate for us to be reading so we read everything we could and when i first went off to boarding school i was just amazed at the idea of a library and the library was just one small room with a wall full of books but one wall full of books i read over a hundred books that here it's like books are becoming like  where there was bare and there was nothing now all of a sudden this has this beautiful quality books which would were to spend lots of money here and they're going to be in the hands of many children it's going to be a blessing and this mindset of all our children is going to be farmed and we are going to have many intelligent children language is the key to the word and now they're going to get language in the early ages and language into the market and rainy stuff and when i was a kid that book and also another book i'm interested i stuck a children's book he's got a lot of small stories in there and i love them too i read a lot i think it helps with everything in life when i was a child my mother used to dump me in a public library when she went to work so it wasn't a bad place to be so i always thought it was a good a good and i think i think my wife is ethiopian so i go to ethiopia lot and i found i couldn't believe there was nothing to read really almost no children's books at all and i think it's a tragedy of the streams at our school the bowery academy it's been amazing we have students who come from homes without running water without electricity who are now attending top colleges in this amazing that students who are coming from this kind of poverty can cheat this way so our dream is that what we're doing at limbo economy obviously is working and so we want to expand that and we wanted to spread to other all of reef e o p and even africa if possible well you know there's millions of kids in ethiopia who are learning how to read but then don't have any books to read and that's where i really hope open hearts big dreams will help fill land by producing these books that are colorful and interesting and in local languages we know there are so many kids that will get excited about reading when they're when i went to ethiopia and i went to the libraries that that were built through this organization and i actually took some books and distribute the books to those kids in need i could see they excite month of these kids when they got their hands on these books only could change their individual lives but it has a potential to transform ethiopia indeed theo peons so that's that's how i see the impact of this or going to well i'm the one who got to take the first nine hundred books over and watch them be distributed to kids and there were five people walking around the classroom snapping pictures with flash because of course the classrooms are very bright and the light is low and those kids just couldn't even be distracted they were so fascinated these were the first children's books they had ever held they were the first story books they had ever read and the pictures were colorful and they were about ethiopia and those kids they i watched them turn pages turn pages they would get to the end and they would flip quickly to the front and start again reading again so i just know that books colorful books with stories in them those are the fascinating things that make it worth reading and those are things that kids are having the first chance to to have in the open with these books my hope is a lot of people  going to see the possibility and this organization can also pattern and with so many and books are going to be available for everyone in our children we just heard today there are three million very eager to read so when they read they learn a lot right so they don't read as always you know they get second hand information right there they themselves learn a lot opened a lot of libraries eighty but i think every year there are so many more children that i don't think the numbers who have access to books is decreasing so the problem is much bigger and i think i think ethiopian people have to think and in america and ethiopia have to think about this because without books you you can't learn very much oh my goodness well already teach girls coding and that already has had a huge impact in closing the gender gap and you know it's very sophisticated and they were just learning coding they had they were learning coding and applying it to a project that they were interested in so these kids are really getting prepared for today's world and i would hope that we can continue to do that with support from luckily books stay around a long time i mean i still read books that were created let's say back in the one nine hundred fifty s when i was born right but if i discover it for the first time it's a new book to me so i do think the books will have a life that will go on and on and on and adults sometimes buy books for their children that they love to read as children so hopefully there will be that ripple effect in ethiopia the message that i can transmit to them i is reading books is not only for four for one to be able to read and write but it's actually transformative through books you can only would transform your life but it will help you transform your country and your people you know sometimes people just especially when we were kids of course they're told you wouldn't have books but usually when you go to school  read the immediate thinking is oh i'll go read this and study and get a grade and get a job but as you grow and become an adult you would start to realize that books  guess i assume that there will be some kids who would dream of writing books there would be some kids who would dream of illustrating books there would be kids who would use their reading skills or the creative skills to go on and do other wonderful things but we've seen that there are always some children who just absolutely grab on to what school has to offer and go in amazing places like who is talking tonight about her experience as a young your tree and girl so those those children are going to take advantage of what they have and they're going to take it amazing places well whenever you have a gift a god given gift to a gift that you were created with when you use it and when you use it for other people it enrich is you it you're giving something away but you are actually becoming enriched so it's just  there's just no downside to volunteer eating and using your gifts for other people sometimes we think we have to make sacrifices for other people but the wonderful thing about using your creativity is that when you use your creativity for someone else to go to school so i want my dream is all kids go to school well i think they should all read to the children they should try and get their children as many books as possible and they should do a little bit to support organizations like ethiopia reads or or other or even tell people who vote in ethiopia or if they have connections to government or because i think this will be sold to an ethiopian people start asking for