We Love Reading - An Introduction

by Rana Dajani

84 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Rana Dajani is a Palestinian-Syrian-Jordanian molecular biologist, author, social entrepreneur, feminist and mother of four. She is Associate Professor at the Hashemite University in Jordan and a visiting professor at Yale and Cambridge. She has received both Fulbright and Eisenhower fellowships and most recently, she was a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2017-2018).

She is the leading expert on the genetics of Circassian and Chechen populations in Jordan. She has also pioneered research with Yale University in studying refugee youth and the epigenetics of stress and trauma across generations. She writes for Science and Nature and she was ranked 12th on Lifestyle Magazine’s list of 100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2015. She is a member of the UN Women-Jordan advisory council and in 2017, she organized the first Gender Summit for the Arab World.

On top of her day job, Dajani is also Founder and Director of the NGO, We Love Reading. It is a community-based initiative that aims to instill the love of reading for pleasure among children. The organization’s mission is to open a library in every neighbourhood and as of 2019, We Love Reading has expanded throughout Jordan, to refugee camps in Jordan and Ethiopia, and more than 45 countries around the world.

This innovative, low-cost and effective model has received many international awards including the Klaus Jacobs Award 2018, World Literacy Summit 2018, UNESCO International Literacy Prize 2017, Stars Impact Award 2015, King Hussein Medal of Honor 2014, WISE Awards 2014 and Clinton Global Initiative 2010. We Love Reading actively tests the impact of its program and has collaborated in research projects with Yale, Brown, Harvard, NYU, Chicago University and UNICEF. We Love Reading was featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s Fall 2017 issue in the article 1001 Story Times.