March 31, 2016
It’s a long way from Yarraman and Nanango to Haiti, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia, Mongolia, New York and the United Nations …
But former Yarraman State School and Nanango State High School student Rebecca McDonald completed the journey two weeks ago when she addressed a UNESCO conference in Paris about her charity, Library For All.
It all began in 2010 when Rebecca (nee Trevena) and her husband Barry moved from Brisbane to Haiti to help the country rebuild after it was hit with a devastating earthquake.
Rebecca visited schools with fewer than 30 books shared between hundreds of students.
The books were regarded as so precious they were kept under lock and key, rarely viewed and never taken home.
And for Rebecca, who has a love of books and reading, this was shocking.
So she made it her mission to help all Third World children have access to books.
Two years later she founded Library For All with a vision to create a digital library from the world’s collective resources that could be easily accessible to anyone living in poverty.
The project received its initial capital ($109,000) through a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter, and is now on the way to making itself self-sustaining.
The idea behind Library For All is fairly simple.
In the Third World, most people do not have easy access to high bandwidth Internet or most other modern technologies. But they do have access to low bandwidth 3G phone networks.
So she has teamed up with a group of technologists to create a library of books that can be easily accessed in low bandwidth environments from mobile phones and tablets.
One important innovation her team has introduced is that the books will download in the background and if the bandwidth cuts out, will wait until it’s restored to resume the download until the process is complete.
This helps ensure Library For All readers can get complete books, even in environments where the wifi network is flaky and unreliable.
Since 2012, Library for All has put digital libraries into schools in Haiti, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia and Mongolia.
Along the way it has attracted growing support from global corporations like News Corp, Forbes and Squarespace as well as philanthropic trusts such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, Knight News and the English Family Foundation, amongst many others.
Library For All is a nonprofit organisation.
Its mission, Rebecca says, is to make knowledge accessible to every person on the planet to give all people the opportunity to learn, dream, and aspire to lift themselves out of poverty.
At her talk in Paris, Rebecca spoke not only about Library For All, but also about implementing similar programs in other countries.
She also discussed how reading and having access to books can have a monumental effect on learning outcomes for children.
Rebecca and her executive team have won numerous awards over the last few years, including the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award and the SXSW Dewey Winburne Service Award.
The project has also been written up in Newsweek, the Huffington Post, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, Publisher’s Weekly, Buzzfeed, Alleywire, Mashable and many others.
Nanango High School, which keeps track of its alumni through a “Where Are They Now?” program, is particularly proud of Rebecca.
“Although Yarraman and Nanango are a far cry from the world Rebecca now lives in, it is good to know that coming from a small town doesn’t stop you from making a difference in someone’s life,” Nanango High School’s program coordinator Deb Bygrave said.
- External Link: Library For All
