How we plan to make books available to every child
I started writing short stories for my daughter as soon as I found out I was going to become a father. The stories were about the places I’ve traveled to in my life. As I believe reading and traveling are the best forms of education, I thought doing this was a great idea for my daughter for when she gets a bit older.
Every night during my wife’s pregnancy, I thought about the woman my daughter would become. The possibilities and dreams were endless! One night I dreamed about her becoming a successful doctor. Other nights I would dream about her becoming an amazing pianist or even being elected president. This all continued until one evening, when I started to think about the many fathers whose experience is limited because their children don’t have access to education.
About 124 million children around the world are denied opportunities to enter and complete school. — Unicef 2016
I decided to turn my scrambled notes and various short stories into a reality. I would show my daughter the world, while making books available to every child in the world.
With the help of my friend Sofía, who works at an NGO called Pro México Indígena, I traveled to Katab, a Mayan community in southern Mexico. I fell in love with the community, its culture, and their work harvesting honey. I sat down with the local children and we wrote a book together. In the end, they wrote the entire book themselves. They made up the characters, setting, plot, conflict, everything! We just illustrated the book.
Together with Phox, a good friend and a very talented illustrator, and Sean, also a great friend and a former teacher, we started Junglos with the purpose of making books available to every child, #AllWithBooks. Inspired by Blake and Toms shoes, we decided that for every book we sold, we buy one book and added to the library we are building in Katab. The idea was simple, until it was time to choose the first books for the library. It was too much of a responsibility to have, so we decided the customers should make that decision based on their favorite books. Eventually, the idea of a cultural exchange was born. Families around the world would learn about Katab through one of our books, and the people in Katab would learn about the customer’s world through their favorite book. Thanks to all our customers, we have bought books from C.S. Lewis, the Grimm Brothers, Roald Dahl, Jules Verne, and much more.
We will continue to visit different communities in need and write more children’s books to show families around the world different cultures and places, as we provide books to every child in the world.
Why Junglos?
During college I developed an online game where children could earn virtual coins in exchange for doing something good for the environment. These tasks including doing things such as cleaning rivers, separating organics from inorganics, conserving water, and much more. The coin was named Junglos. Ever since then, I believe that a business is not about making money, but what you do with it.
I decided to name the company Junglos as a promise to always do good first before receiving any form of payment.
DoGoodFirst is a journey on how to build businesses that make the world a better place. Nothing is written in stone, and we know we are far away to making it fully right, but we are prepared to take the journey.
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