It began with a girl,
a hospital bed, & a book.
At five years old, our founder became a patient. Childhood became waiting rooms, IV poles, and long white ceilings. The thing that made those days survivable wasn't in a medicine cart. It was a stack of stories.
But growing up between hospital stays as a young woman of Indian and Hawaiian descent, she almost never met a hero who looked like her. Books were her window out of that room. She wanted them to be a mirror, too.
Ashalia Aggarwal, on her TEDxMarshallU talk3
So in 2015, still in high school, she started sharing books, and The Giving Palm grew from there:4 a project that curates and delivers books with diverse characters to hospitalized children and teens. Books each child keeps, because a story that finally sees you shouldn't have to be returned.
Mirrors & windows
Every shelf we build balances two kinds of books: mirrors, where a child meets someone like themselves on the page, and windows, which open onto lives beyond the hospital walls.
Being recognized is rarely only about race. It might be the sport a kid plays, the language spoken at their kitchen table, the condition on their chart, the family they go home to, or the thing they are quietly afraid of. Identity has many layers, and the right book meets a child on whichever one is aching that week.
Tap a book to see what it carries:
A hero with her diagnosis, and a plan to outsmart it.
The mirrors-and-windows idea comes from educator Rudine Sims Bishop, whose work inspires our curation.2
