Malawi Children's Reading Garden Project

Lisa Vihos is an educator, project manager, poet-activist, grant writer, and the Development and Communications Coordinator at the Lakeshore Natural Resource Partnership based in Cleveland, WI. She has a long history of working in the arts and higher education in Sheboygan and elsewhere, having been the Curator of Education at John Michael Kohler Arts Center from 2002 to 2007, and then a member of the Advancement team at Lakeland University until 2015. It was at Lakeland that she met the Malawian graduate students who planted in her mind the idea of creating a children's reading garden (inspired by Sheboygan's own Bookworm Gardens). In 2016, she applied for and received a Time-Out Grant from her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar College, to do just that.

In her presentation at Early Bird Rotary on Thursday, August 31, Lisa will share how the project began, the twists and turns of the first year of project development, and her most recent trip to Malawi in July 2017. One year in to the project, she can see that the connections made are starting to take hold. She is excited to share the progress to date. She will also highlight what she sees coming on the horizon as she works with her partners in Malawi to support literacy and a culture of reading on the other side of the world.