​
​
​
​
​
Meet the Board
Meet the Board
MARA CONSERVATION
encouraging empathy for other life
MLP Team in Morocco
Advisors in Morocco
RURAL SCHOOL LIBRARIES
The Powerful Changemaker
Learners everywhere deserve to have a great library. Oliveseed began in 2014 by developing libraries for young English learners in the deserts and mountains of Morocco, and today, libraries are still one of our central pillars. We believe that if you can do only one thing in this world to boost education, put a high-quality, culturally relevant library where there had never been one before. We have seen again and again that a great library opens eyes and opportunities, ignites a culture of reading and learning, nurtures critical thinking, helps teachers create effective programs, and spreads the power of knowledge fairly. Our library program continuously evolves to meet community desires, from expanding access to global topics to incorporating story-writing from local youth.
Morocco Library Project (MLP)
Since 2014, through our program Morocco Library Project (MLP) we have developed English libraries in rural Morocco, each one tailored to the needs of motivated students anxious to learn English. We focused on under-privileged Amazigh communities, places that had not had libraries before. Though the settings may be under-resourced, the young people here are so passionate to expand their knowledge and world view and to master a new language. In collaboration with local teachers, we learned about each context and then curated libraries, supporting an explosion of after-school English programs at schools and youth centers. In the end, we developed libraries at 40 rural locations, many of them small and tailored to the interests of students in classes and reading clubs, and others larger for a whole school.
Our goal is to inspire a love of learning, and for young people in Morocco to know they can make a positive difference in this world. We also seek to build friendship between the U.S. and North Africa.
Currently, our focus at MLP iis our national Short Story Competition for teens in Morocco, with published anthologies, along with an occasional village children's library.
Maasai Mara School Libraries
We launched the Maasai Mara School Libraries initiative in Kenya in 2017 at Mara Girls Leadership School in Talek and then expanded to the neediest public schools. The need here is so urgent, as we found that no public school in the area had anything like a library or other resources for enriched learning. We take a holistic approach here, providing curriculum enrichment texts requested by the teachers for every subject and level, along with story books in English and Kiswahili to meet our own objective of inspiring a culture of reading. We aim to put rural Maasai students in parity with their counterparts at privileged private schools, meeting our goal for fair, equal access to high-quality education and opportunities for a brighter future.
​
Each library has 2000 books, laptops, and (for primary schools) games and puzzles, and we partner with Wildlife Clubs of Kenya to include a Conservation Corner. We run capacity-building workshops to train teachers and students on maintaining their library and on creating programs that will inspire the next generation to read, learn, and grow.