We Love Reading

"We Love Reading" exists to positively impact children throughout Jordan by creating a library in local neighborhoods, thereby actively encouraging each community to share in the experience of storytelling, and creating a life-long enthusiasm for each child to read and acquire knowledge. In 2006, founder Rana Dajani established a non-governmental organization "We Love Reading" for her children and 60 others, ranging in age from 4 to 10, at local mosques. With the help of local partners, the project has trained 400 women in animated storytelling and held reading sessions to inspire children to read.

The practice of storytelling associates reading with pleasure and shapes a child's relationship with literature that will hopefully follow them into their adult lives. After each interactive storytelling session, we allow children to check out books that they take home to read with their parents, passing the experience along from child to parent in an attempt to change attitudes towards reading.

We have been successful in cultivating a cadre of young readers who are enthusiastic about the practice and will have more educational and professional opportunities through the development of this skill. There are now 100 established libraries in various areas of Jordan. We are training women in the practice of reading aloud to children so they may expand our local model of a library to other rural neighborhoods in Jordan and the Arab world. We love reading envisions providing children all over Jordan and the Arab world with the experience of being read to, thereby instilling the love reading in an easy, sustainable and cost efficient  way. We love reading's mission is to establish a library in every neighborhood by training storytellers from their neighborhoods and giving them books to start and help sustain their libraries. As a result we have won the Arab social innovator award from Synergos (http://www.synergos.org/bios/ranadajani.htm)  and the Ahel Himmeh 2009 nomination for recognizing community volunteer efforts in Jordan (http://www.himmeh.jo/?q=node/2478). Our website is: www.welovereading.org

Mission

Establishing a library in every neighborhood in the Arab world by training individuals from the neighborhood to read out loud to the children 4-10 years old, reading material that is appropriate for their age. And organizing these storytellers in a network for sustainability.