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MEET THE CREATIVE FORCES BEHIND GLOBAL FUND FOR CHILDREN BOOKS

Lisa Heydlauff

Author, Going to School in India

Lisa Heydlauff believes that our imaginations can change the world. She grew up in England, Canada, and the United States, and she now calls India home. Going to School in India was inspired by seven-year-old Oliver, who asked Lisa, his teacher, “What is it like to go to school in India?” She promised that if she ever got the chance, she would find out.

Lisa is a global person, part of a generation that understands the world as a truly interconnected system. She has been on a lifelong journey to explore communication as a preparation for change, for solving problems. She moved from England to the United States as a young girl and found that her experiences were very different from her schoolmates’ and that this made connecting with other youth challenging. Later she returned to England and taught children in an alternative school. She realized that she could tell them about Mexico because she had been there, but not about India, for example, because she could not speak from experience.

Lisa is determined to continue her quest in India, where she has lived and worked for the last seven years. During that time, she worked for UNICEF and began, on her own, to conceptualize a collection of stories about children in India. She also edited a magazine with a minuscule budget and learned how to work with the advertising sponsors who made production possible. As her idea crystallized, she found a photographer and set out on months of travel all over India, seeking out schools and children whose words and experiences she could present in stories. The result is new and fresh. Parents in India have told her that they are so happy to have her stories to read to their children and to tell them about other places in their vast country.