One Person CAN Make A Difference: 1,000 Black Girl Books

@LisaBerghoff/@DanKim 

Happy February! As I was researching for this week's post I happened to stumble upon this incredible resource and thought this was a great time to share it as we are celebrating Black History Month and Marley Dias is a young black woman who has already made history but no doubt will continue to do so as she continues on her journey. Her story is a reminder that it is possible for one person to have an impact that matters. 

If you haven't heard of Marley, where have you been?  No judgement, I'm happy to introduce you to her!

She is the youngest member of Forbes 30 under 30 and has spoken at countless super impressive events, like the White House's United States of Women,  as well as on many popular television shows like The Today Show and CBS This Morning.

Here's a brief introduction to Marley. Back in 2015, Marley was an elementary school student who decided to solve a problem. She saw that few of the books available to her and her schoolmates featured Black female protagonists and she started a campaign to change that. She started with a goal of collecting 1,000 books with Black girls as the main characters. To date, the database now has over 13,000 books. GrassROOTS Community Foundation has created the database which is an outstanding resource to all educators. 

Here is a 1 minute video of Marley:

You can check out Marley's website here.

The link to the GrassROOTS database is here. 

Some nice features of the database include the ability to search by author or title. You can also search by "reading level" which includes emerging reader to adult reader. You can also print or download the list

Want more Marley? She is also an author. You can check out her book here.