Teaching a love of learning is transforming education systems

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Kyle Zimmer: I think sometimes we trip over the fact that education is one thing, it's one problem, when in fact it's very broad.

Pavitra Raja: Welcome to Let's Fix It, the podcast from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and the World Economic Forum that speaks to leading social innovators and finds out how they're fixing some of the world's biggest problems.

They say children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. In this episode, we're talking to two social innovators from two different continents doing just that.

Rana Dajani: They learn to express themselves, and most importantly, they learn empathy. And they get the courage to become the change makers from the stories they read and from discovering their inner potential, literally and figuratively.

Pavitra Raja: Subscribe to Let's Fix It on Apple, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts and make sure to like, rate and review us. I'm Pavitra Raja at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Join me and learn how some of the world's brightest minds are quite literally fixing it.

My first guest has been transforming the education system in North America for over three decades. In the early nineties, while working for a big law firm, Kyle Zimmer realized that she wanted to contribute more to her community. While volunteering at a soup kitchen, she realized that the children were missing one crucial thing: books. This inspired her to start First Book, an organization dedicated to providing affordable books and other resources. Kyle Zimmer is a lawyer, social entrepreneur, leader and one of my personal mentors. Let's dive right into our conversation.

Kyle Zimmer: So First Book, for 30 years we've been focused on fixing educational equity for kids in need across the US and Canada. It's a profound problem. I think sometimes we trip over the fact in the social sector that education is one thing, it's one problem, when in fact it's very broad. And the impact of those issues affects every one of us.

And so it's everything, from not really understanding what's going on, as a country, in those frontline settings of schools, after-schools, preschools all kinds of programmes serving kids in need. It's not having professional development for educators. And it's a huge array, and it's tied into housing and hunger and all kinds of issues.

Pavitra Raja: Educational equity is a profound problem, and it's a cross-cutting problem. Now, why is this something that First Book is focused on? Why are you fixing this exact problem?

Kyle Zimmer: I was raised in Appalachia, which is a rural area in the United States and an area that's had a lot of challenges with poverty. And so I was lucky enough to be raised in a family that prioritized education, and books, and curiosity, and all the things that allowed me to open doors through my life, through my career. I know other kids I grew up with didn't have those same opportunities, so I came into the issue very personally.

And so I was in the practice of law, and Washington, DC hit a really tough period in the late eighties and early nineties with the crack epidemic. And so, you know, I sort of jumped in and started volunteering. And it's sort of like when you pull one thread on a sweater, you begin to see the broad impact of something as central, as fundamental as education.

And when I look at it, I think it's the next wave of the civil rights movement. It is fundamental to whether kids are able to grow into adults who participate fully in their communities, who have economic opportunities so that they can support themselves, support their families.

It has everything to do all the way up from the community level to the national level. It has dramatic implications on our economy and it has dramatic implications on our democracy. I see it as a real cornerstone for a huge array of absolutely foundational issues that will determine whether we succeed or we fail as a country.

Pavitra Raja: You talked a little bit about your journey. Tell me, how does one go from being a lawyer to a social entrepreneur?

Kyle Zimmer: I think it's in my DNA. So I was raised in a family where it wasn't okay to sit off on the sidelines. That wasn't acceptable. And so no matter what career I would have chosen, I think I would have ended up being an activist from one angle or another. I also think that lawyers tend to go into law because we believe in social justice. We believe in judicial systems that at least aspirationally treat people fairly.

During this period in Washington, DC, where the crack epidemic hit, where the violence spiked in the city, I was living a very, very insulated life. You know, I would be driving to work with a cappuccino in my hand, and at some point you recognize that's not enough, at least not for me.

And so I started volunteering at a soup kitchen called Martha's Table. A lot of people in the Washington area know Martha's Table now. At the time, this is, you know, more than 30 years ago, it was a little sliver of a soup kitchen in an area of town that was struggling. And I started working with kids after work, two or three times a week. And they were coming in for a meal, certainly, and they were coming in for adults who they knew would be there and a safe place to hang out because the violence in that area was pretty staggering.

I'm not a teacher, I am nobody's teacher, but I did begin to recognize that if I just had books that I could sit and read for a couple of hours with the kids, that that would be great. It would be focused and they'd get something out of it that was real. And so it really started there.

And I will confess that although I was raised trying to understand poverty that I was not experiencing, that it hadn't occurred to me that kids were growing up without books in their schools, without books in their homes. And so I became a student of that, and I really read a lot of the research.

I started peeling back the business models of the publishing industry to really begin to understand, like social entrepreneurs all over the world do, right? We try to understand, untie the knot of that problem so we can begin to weave together a solution. And so it really started with that volunteer opportunity. You know how they always say it changes the volunteer more than anything else? That certainly was the case in my life.

Pavitra Raja: It's an incredible story, Kyle. So, 30 years of First Book. I wanted to know a little bit about, what are you proud of? What in particular are you proud of that First Book has achieved in the last 30 years?

Kyle Zimmer: I think I'm mostly proud of the fact that we've never stopped innovating. Every day at First Book we say, 'What's the next market failure that we can address?', that we can build a solution for that has an economic engine under it so that it can be scaled in a profound way and make a difference, at least at the national level.

We've developed a series of programmes over the years, but we've never stood still. Even when you look at our work in books and publishing, we're constantly saying, 'Can we change formats? Can we help bring in new authors? Can we push to elevate, to use our buying power, to elevate the diversity of content available to kids?' Like, we're always looking at what we've built and trying to apply it to the next big failure.

Pavitra Raja: You talk about a lot of things First Book does, but you never stop innovating. I think that's incredible, especially for an NGO. Tell me a little bit about your model and how it works, and why is it so important to keep innovating in this sector?

Kyle Zimmer: We are happy with what we've built, but we're not satisfied. And so that keeps us moving and keeps us going.

So at the heart of the First Book model is our online community, called the First Book Network. And the network is the largest online community of adults in the lives of kids in need in North America and by far the fastest growing. We currently have over 550,000 members, and these are, educators is the word we use, but we mean that very comprehensively.

It can be a teacher in a Title I classroom, which is a poverty designation in the States. It can be a homeless shelter or a library, or a health care setting. We even have barbershops that are signed up. So our criteria is you either have to be Title I, Title I eligible, which again is that poverty designation for schools, or you have to be able to show us that you serve a minimum of 70% of kids from low income families.

And children, by the way, we define zero to 18. So it's immensely broad and it's the first time anybody has tried to aggregate that entire community of people together, which in and of itself is important.

I mean, everything that is happening, that's large scale, when you look at political parties or you look at labour unions and you look at these major movements, what it usually is fuelled by is pulling together a very broad group of people who have core tenets in common. And that's what the First Book community is, and that's what it does.

And so to serve this community, we have built three programmes. Now all of them address market failures. So the first one is called First Book Research and Insight. And that failure is the fact that in the United States there's no central ongoing research hub focused on kids in poverty. There is a lot of research being done, but it's chopped up.

And what we began to realize is that unless you have your fingers on the pulse of exactly what's happening in those classrooms, in those programmes, that you're at an extraordinary disadvantage as a field, not just First Book, but the field, to understand what solutions are needed, what's working, what's not working.

We do over 30 studies a year, and it allows us to very quickly get thousands and thousands of responses to tell us what's keeping those educators up at night. What are they seeing in the lives of kids? What resource constraints do they have? It's a tremendous arm that gives us a lot of insight that I don't think has ever existed before. It informs both what First Book does and then also increasingly, it's being pulled into ... like Lego has hired us to do some work on product design, which is thrilling because, all of a sudden, you're bringing educator voices into the design phase of apps and products. It's true also for curriculum developers, we're working with a group of those.

The second one is called the First Book Accelerator. And the accelerator is where, after listening to our community and saying to them, 'What do you need? What challenges do you feel like you're not trained for?' And they'll say things that are critically important. They'll say mental health, not only their mental health, but the mental health of the kids. They say, you know, we believe that we're seeing issues of mental health in the children we're serving, but we have no training in that. We don't know how to explain it. We don't know what to do with it. If we're worried, if we're concerned about it we don't know how to talk to their parents so that it's it's something that we can address together.

You know, so that's one. One is, another category, race and culture in the classroom. You've undoubtedly seen that the United States is struggling with a group of people who do not believe that that we should be discussing the full history of the United States. It has deep racial implications. It has deep cultural implications, but it doesn't stop there. I mean, our classrooms look like the UN. It's fabulous, but educators need to have some training. They need to understand ways to approach topics in sensitive ways.

And so these are the kinds of things that we listen to through our research arm. And then the accelerator allows us to go out and find the leading experts to provide strategies and training for our community. So that's a really vibrant part of our work.

And finally, is the First Book Marketplace. And the First Book Marketplace is an nonprofit e-commerce site to address the fact that these classrooms and programmes do not have the physical resources, books, STEM resources, science, PE, all kinds of resources like that. And by bringing market strength to our community, we are able to distribute either for free or at very, very low cost, 15-17 million books annually. In all three of these research and insights, the marketplace and the accelerator all are revenue generating as well.

Pavitra Raja: This also translates a little bit to your partnerships, right? I really particularly want to dig into the partnership piece, because First Book works in partnership with Disney, with Dr Seuss, so many different multinational companies. Why is that so important and how has that helped you scale your operation?

Kyle Zimmer: Yeah, we really work hard to build partnerships with the private sector and also with other social sector enterprises.

To focus on the private sector, let us not be so foolish as to imagine that we do not need every oar in the water to overcome the issues that all of us are dedicating our lives to. That's a profound mistake.

We desperately need the horsepower, the capacities, the financial support that the private sector can provide to us so that we can grow, so that we can have more impact and so that we can be sustainable. And so that's critical. We need them as an institution, but we also need them to get the results we all are hoping for. These are the employers. These are the large companies and small ones that are making the economy rev its engine at the local level all the way up to the national and global level.

And they need us because the truth is, is that the days when the world could run itself like a gated community, where the problem stayed out there and the big gates would close, those days are over. We have economies that are lurching around. We have industries that are struggling to get trained employees. We have these profound needs that are pulling down our major corporations and that fuels everything we all do.

Increasingly, business is attuned to the fact that they can't just say, 'you know what, education, you guys just go off and fix that', because it has too many implications for them and we can't do it without them. We can't do it without government either, and foundations and high net worth individuals, all of us are chasing after these dragons of these problems that have not been overcome in the history of civilization.

And so God forbid that any sector believes, or any institution believes, that they've got this by themselves because we've got thousands of years of evidence to suggest otherwise.

Pavitra Raja: Social entrepreneurs, social innovators fail every day. So give me an example of a key lesson that you learned from a failure.

Kyle Zimmer: I'll give you a recent example. First Book is in the process of developing a scaling plan for the next five, six years that will take us into 100% of Title I schools in the US. And it's critical for a whole lot of reasons. But that wasn't the design we started with. We started with a different design that was focused on the First Book Marketplace – an engine for us, it's a major impact engine for us – and we started with that, since it is a business engine that's been successfully running for almost 20 years. We packaged it with a lot of great advice from KPMG and others, and we spent, I'm going to say, a year talking to banks and we were talking to banks because if you take that part of the model, it's a business and yet it's a nonprofit, but it has revenue, it has inventory, it has all the other benchmarks. I think we talked to probably almost 40 banks and it was not successful.

Yeah, I'll go ahead and use the 'F' word – failure. It was a failure. But what we learned was that we didn't have the right design. We weren't approaching it through the right lens, you know. And every time we had one of those conversations, we got slightly smarter and slightly smarter. You go into one of those presentations, ready and you've practiced and to hear 'no' 40 times is not the best time anyone's ever had, you know.

And now we've completely retooled it. The bad news is it took time. The good news is our design is smarter and if we hadn't gone through that process, we would have missed all that learning that we did. And so failure isn't just a thing that happens when you're just in start-up mode.

The most important thing to do when you're in business or you're running a social enterprise is when you are thinking through a problem – any problem, staffing, finance – you make a list of the smartest people you can think of, whether you know them or not. You boil your issue down to two or three quick questions and you start calling those individuals.

If you say to somebody, 'I'm trying to build an enterprise that will have this impact on the world, and I have these two questions. Will you get on the phone with me for 15 minutes?' You'll be shocked at how many people will step up. I am telling you, I've gotten the best advice from the most extraordinary people by doing that simple exercise over the years. And so I strongly advise it.

Pavitra Raja: That was the amazing Kyle Zimmer, president, CEO and co-founder of First Book.

Stay tuned because after the break, we're going to hear from Rana Dajani, a scientist using a simple formula to get kids reading in the Middle East.

Linda Lacina: I'm Linda Lacina, host of Meet the Leader, the flagship leadership podcast from the World Economic Forum, where top leaders from business, government and more share how they're tackling the world's biggest challenges. Leaders like activist Jane Goodall.

Jane Goodall: You've got to reach the heart. It's no good arguing with the head.

Linda Lucina: Leadership expert John Amaechi.

John Amaechi: You can find your inner giant no matter what.

Linda Lucina: Or leaders like former Vice President Al Gore.

Al Gore: We have to be willing to make bold moves.

Linda Lucina: Or even CEOs like Verizon's Hans Vestberg.

Hans Vestberg: If we want to lead other people, you need to start with yourself.

Linda Lucina: Only from the World Economic Forum, this is Meet the Leader.

Pavitra Raja: Welcome back to Let's Fix It, the podcast from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship at the World Economic Forum. In this episode of Let's Fix It, we're talking to social innovators who are inspiring children to imagine a better future.

As a scientist, Dr Rana Dajani knows the importance of observation and research. She observed that many children in the Middle East region don't read for pleasure. Through research, she found that reading aloud to children is one very effective way to tackle the problem. This is when she founded We Love Reading, an organization that is now active in 63 countries worldwide. Let's jump right into our conversation.

Rana Dajani: What keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning is this feeling that we need to accelerate working together as a community, as humanity, to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. As a first stage, other goals will come later, but that's the first stage.

The way to do that is not by having quick fixes and Band-Aids, but actually to turn every person into a change-maker. For every person, every human being on Earth, to think of themselves as responsible citizens who have the capacity to identify the challenges within their local community and come up with local solutions that they themselves can implement.

And that way, the solutions would be sustainable, would be local, would be owned by the people themselves. So to me then, the question of systems change is not about scaling a solution, but actually scaling a mindset of 'I can', and that's what I try to address.

Pavitra Raja: Could you talk to us a little bit about the work that you do with We Love Reading and also your role as a scientist in inspiring young people. Tell us a little bit about how you inspire that 'I can' attitude.

Rana Dajani: And the way I think we can scale that 'I can' attitude is finding what is that spark that can trigger every person to think of themselves in that way. Right? But it has to be a simple trigger. It can't be a complicated, expensive programme, otherwise it defies the purpose. And what I have discovered from my local culture, my Muslim tradition, is that there are actually small triggers that have huge impacts, and one of those is reading.

You know, the first word in the Quran is Iqra, which means read. We think it's a simple act. It's a profound act, because when we say read, it's reading to understand, reading to reflect, reading to be critical, reading to change from within and from without.

And so the programme I developed is called We Love Reading, and it's about fostering a love of reading among children and adults, by focusing on the read aloud experience. We're social creatures; we need that social, social interaction. And so by having an adult or a youth reading aloud to a child, you're creating that experience of falling in love with reading and hence reaping the benefits of reading through that process.

Because when children and adults fall in love with reading, they become lifelong readers and therefore lifelong learners. They also develop their critical skills and they develop vocabulary. They learn to express themselves, and most importantly, they learn empathy. And they get the courage to become the change-makers from the stories they read and from discovering their inner potential, literally and figuratively.

I also want evidence, and that's where the scientist comes in, right? So I worked with different scholars around the world, both local universities, regional universities from my part of the world in the Middle East, but also internationally from Harvard and Yale and Chicago and Queen Mary University to study the impact of We Love Reading as a program on the children and on the adults, so that we understand how the programme works and we can draw lessons and how to develop it better.

And we've been able to show through randomized control trials that the children's attitudes towards reading improved, that the women who lead these reading aloud sessions have changed in terms of their motivation to lead, their leadership attitudes, their feeling of well-being and their happiness and psychology have all improved.

From this experience of being an implementer on the ground, a social entrepreneur and a scientist who believes in evidence and data-driven work, is that any systems change approaches have to be designed in a holistic way, strategically. It can't be drawing on a board in an office in another country. It has to come from the people doing trial and error. Today we call it human centered design, I like to call it evolution. Evolution is about natural selection of trial and error to get the most fit for that environment. And that's what people who live in a community can do on their own. And that's what I mean when I say through We Love Reading and science-based evidence, we can actually scale that mindset of 'I can'.

Pavitra Raja: You are a social entrepreneur, you're a scientist, a molecular biologist as well. You're at MIT right now. You're a mum, you're a grandma. Congratulations again. Tell me a little bit about your journey, your entrepreneurship journey. What are a couple of things that have happened that have brought you to the place that you are today.

Rana Dajani: Actually, it's just by being a human being. It's following that innate qualities that allowed us to survive, starting with curiosity. It's about having that curious mind inside me, which is inside of our human being that drives me to ask questions, make observations, and to follow those questions wherever they take you.

And whenever I feel lost, I just remember to think of what makes me curious, what tickles my brain and makes me excited to learn more. So I think that's one fundamental thing. The other fundamental thing that keeps me going is this feeling of responsibility that I think comes from my upbringing and my tradition and religion, that every person is a guardian, that we have a responsibility for our local community. And that kind of feeling of responsibility and not waiting for somebody to change, but being the change myself is what pushes me to keep trying.

But what helps it and helps me not to be overwhelmed is that, again, drawing from my tradition, I am not responsible for the results. I am responsible to do something now. What can I do now? And that is so freeing, right? Because if you're going to think, 'Oh my God, I'm responsible for the results, this is too much, I can't do it.' Or you think about, 'No, I'm responsible of making an effort today, within my capacity.' Then it's about doing small things, and then suddenly you have the power.

And you never, never underestimate the impact of small things. And that's from physics. The chaos theory, right? When a butterfly flutters its wings in one part of the world, it moves the air a centimeter, but the result is a hurricane in some other place and time. And so these little efforts are the butterflies that will make a change and a difference.

And that's what I draw from in my life every day. And maybe lastly is, again, this is part of our innate qualities as human beings, the ability to dream. If you can dream it, then it's possible, right? And so it's about dreaming and being creative and have a wide imagination and trusting that gut feeling that you believe you can do it. And therefore, my motto is that nothing is impossible. If you can dream it, then it's possible. You just have to trust yourself and keep at it, keep doing it, and eventually, if you believe in it, others will start believing in it and will see it the way you see it. And that's how we as humans have been able to develop all these advances.

Pavitra Raja: Rana, I want to also talk to you a little bit about your book, Five Scarves. You mentioned the different scarves that you wear, and each of those scarves represent a different part of your life. Would you like to tell us a little bit about the Five Scarves?

Rana Dajani: People introduce me in different capacities, and I like to own that. And that's why I say I wear, I play five roles in my life and people indicate a hat for a role, But I don't wear a hat, I wear a scarf as a Muslim, by my own choice. Through the veil or the scarf I wear, I unveil my humanity. Because I send out a message for people to look at me as a human being, as a personality, as a mind to engage with, to reflect and discuss. And my five scarves represent my five roles.

And I always start with the first one, which is being a mother. I think we don't talk about that usually. So I like to call that out and say, 'I'm a parent, I have four children and nobody can replace me in that role while other roles can be replaced.' And so I'm going to call this out and talk about it. And this should be for men and women, because also both it's the father and the mother or the caregiver who is taking care of this next generation.

The second scarf that I wear is I'm a teacher, an educator. And again, to me, people don't talk about that role as much, and don't give it as much respect and importance when our children, if they're not at home, they're at school. And so the second most important person in the lives of a child bringing up the next generation is the teacher, who can inspire and shape and mould the brains and personalities of our children in the future, to be responsible, to be optimistic, to empathize, to work in teams, to feel that nothing's impossible, and to be readers and to be critical thinkers.

All this comes from a teacher. It's not about the fancy school. It's not about the fancy curriculum. It's about the teacher who inspired you to become who you are. So I talk about that second role and how we can all be teachers in every stage in our lives, it never ends.

The third role is I'm a scientist. I've always dreamt to be a scientist. I get a kick and a thrill from exploring how molecules talk to each other, how cells interact. So I work on genetics of ethnic populations, looking at ancient DNA, comparing it with modern DNA, looking at the evolutionary history of humans. And then I tie it with everyday experiences, which is I study the impact of trauma and war on displaced people and refugees, and to see whether that impact changes our DNA expression, and whether that impact can be transmitted across generations.

But I do it in a slightly different way. I bring in my lens of looking at it in a positive way. So can we look at the inheritance of resistance and resilience across generations? How have we flourished, despite what has happened to us? So I ask the flip question, and I think that's the unique lens that I bring to science and to help change the way we look at things. In today's world, we need some hope, we need some optimism.

And it's not enough to sit and complain. I say we need to go out and do something about it, right? It's about doing. So my science kind of informs that that, yes, we can prove through science and through data that we can come up with a better solution, harnessing the power of positivity, optimism, resilience and resistance, to move forward to the future.

My fourth scarf is I'm a social entrepreneur. I felt that the knowledge and experience and skills that I have is a responsibility, that I should use them, employ them to make a difference in my wider community. And this is a call for everyone. Wherever you work that you whatever skills you have, these are responsibilities you need to utilize for the greater good.

And so looking outside, using my curious brain, that feeling of responsibility, I realize children don't read for fun, they read for education. But reading for fun is totally different. It's what allows the child to reap the benefits of reading, right? And that was how We Love Reading was born. It's not an organization that is scaling with an office in every country. It's a movement of people. It's a movement of a good virus, of falling in love with reading. It's spreading around the globe and hence in the future, there's no need for my organization to exist because it's already been transferred, scaling of mindsets to every human being around the world.

My fifth scarf is that I'm a human activist. I use again my knowledge, my skills, my feeling of responsibility to support and defend and stand, give a voice to the voiceless for those who are oppressed around the world. But these are real issues, social injustice issues, and it needs people who have the courage to speak what is right regardless of the people around them.

And again, that is an innate human quality that allowed us to survive and flourish, to say what is right, regardless of the people around us, and eventually the rights will prevail and justice will prevail, if we believe it, right? It's about dreaming big again.

Pavitra Raja: What is one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self? Or even if you don't want to get too personal, a piece of advice that you give to someone listening to this podcast as they explore, as they start their journey as a social entrepreneur, or as a mum, or as a scientist?

Rana Dajani: You know, every human being is unique. You are unique. Your DNA is different from any person's DNA that ever existed in the past, that exists today, that will ever exist in the future. This is a scientific fact, right? Even with twins, there's a difference, because of epigenetics, they're exposed to slightly different environments. So your DNA is unique and therefore you have something wonderful and amazing to give the world around you, whether how you see things, how you perceive things, what you're thinking. And so trust yourself, trust in yourself, trust your gut feeling. And if you see something that bothers you, think what you can do about it.

Don't work alone. Work in teams because you're stronger that way. You learn more that way and you gain support because we need it as we go through our journeys in life. It's not about being famous or well-known, or having a big splash, or a big discovery. Every person has their own journey and it's about you putting your own milestones in front of you, being able to achieve them and celebrating it within yourself that you were able to do it. And that is the biggest achievement ever.

And let nobody tell you otherwise. It's about you and your journey. And every journey is special. Every journey is unique, and every journey should be celebrated and is wonderful. And therefore every person in the world has the capacity to make a difference. Every person is that butterfly in the chaos theory.

Pavitra Raja: Tell me something that really excites you about the future, something that We Love Reading is working on, or your own personal research.

Rana Dajani: There's two things I'm very excited about. One is that we want to connect all our We Love Reading ambassadors around the world, in the 64 countries and counting, through a virtual platform, because they are the ones who lead the programme within their local communities. And everyone wants to learn from each other because that's how we grow and mature.

So we want Asima from Za'atari camp in Jordan to share her experience with Maria from Argentina, and Maria from Argentina to share her experience with Matovu from Uganda. So in order to achieve that, we want to create a virtual community which is icon based, very low tech, to reach the most common denominator, regardless of technology or internet connectivity, or even language challenges, for people to be able to converse and share. So that's one.

Second is, finally I have been able to marry my biology research with my social entrepreneurship practical work on the ground. So now we're actually working with a number of scholars around the world studying the impact of We Love Reading on epigenetics of children and their parents, the We Love Reading ambassadors.

Epigenetics is a new field of science where you look at the impact of the environment on expression of certain genes in your DNA. And so we believe, again, we believe that the We Love Reading experience of somebody reading aloud to you in a face-to-face physical encounter over time, regularly, will make a difference in the DNA of children and their parents, reciprocally, to help them alleviate stress, but also build resilience and positivity. And so that's what we're working on and we're very excited because this is cutting edge science and will help develop better programming, better interventions for humans from different groups around the world.

Pavitra Raja: That was Rana Dajani, founder of We Love Reading. Want to hear more ways social innovators are fixing it? Well then check out our website schwabfound.org. Thanks to our guests today, Kyle Zimmer and Rana Dajani.

Please subscribe to Let's Fix It wherever you get your podcasts and please do leave us a rating or a review.

This episode of Let's Fix It was presented by me, Pavitra Raja, and produced by Alex Court with thanks to Amy Kirby and Jere Johansson for editing and Tom Burchell for sound design.

Special thanks to our partners, Motsepe Foundation, and thanks also to our executive producers Georg Schmitt, Robin Pomeroy and Francois Bonnici. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more inspiring stories.