Streetside recently had a visitor from South Africa, Steve Vosloo, who is doing a fellowship at
the Digital Vision Program at Stanford. The project helps fellows use technology to create socially beneficial projects worldwide.
Steve is helping to put hero books on the web and create a place for students worldwide to share their stories through the books. What are hero books? As one
website about the process says,
A Hero Book is a form of Memory Work. It is a document, and a process, in which a child is invited to be the author, illustrator, main character and editor of a book that is designed to give them power over a specific challenge in their life. The Hero Book process can be described as one in which groups of children are led through a series of drawing exercises and autobiographical story telling. In the work there is a focus on challenges and problems, which are in some way political as well as a personal, in the sense that these are problems that affect other children as well, and that have their roots in what may be described as public health issues. At the end of the process, the child has a hand bound storybook of their own making, that heralds and reinforces their hero survival-resilient qualities and that also draws attention to the deeper social issues.
What a great project. It's one that has a lot in common with the work we do at Streetside, and we look forward to hearing more from Steve.
In Today's
San Francisco Chronicle there's a great
article about Firoozeh Dumas. Firoozeh is the author of the hilarious book
Funny In Farsi. It's a wry and loving take on growing up Iranian-American.
When we asked Firoozeh to write the foreword to our student anthology
Finding our Way a few years ago, she was more than happy to. We still remember her appearance at our student reading at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books. She made sure the students read first, and when it was all over, she bought a huge stack of books to give to people she knew would be interested in Streetside.
Since then, Funny in Farsi has been chosen as part of the
recommended reading list for California public school students, and
whole cities have been reading her book.
