We recently connected with Sophie Danielson and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sophie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

As an educator in Southeast Asia, I struggled to find contextualized learning materials that catered to the various ethnicities of my students. I was left with no choice but to build my own learning materials that could foster greater engagement for literate and illiterate students.

That’s when I discovered the power of simple, contextualized cartoons.
Everyone likes cartoons, especially the ones that look like them.

It started when I was 18 years old and bought a one-way ticket to Thailand to work as an English teacher at a school for Burmese migrants.

While working there, I discovered a small shelter near my house, which hosted 45 Rohingya refugees who arrived in Thailand by boat, seeking refuge from the ongoing persecution against them in Rakhine State, Myanmar.

For ten months, I visited their shelter everyday and started teaching them English and math. With little to no materials that provided a cultural context and representation for these people, it was difficult to keep them engaged in my classes. The need for contextualized learning materials became increasingly inevitable.

I wanted to find a more culturally sensitive approach to teaching.

My friend and I started drawing a few basic flashcards with cartoons that represent the Rohingya culture, daily activities, and traditions. For the first time ever, our Rohingya friends were seeing themselves in cartoon form. A perfect learning tool paired with cultural preservation.
The engagement in the classroom was completely transformed and my deep relationship with the Rohingya formed.
Books Unbound – at least the idea of it – was born.

Through a series of fortunate events, these 45 Rohingya refugees were resettled throughout the United States. I started reuniting with them all across the United states – documenting an ongoing storytelling series, called Rohingya Reunions.
My Rohingya friends asked me if I could visit their families overseas – since they didn’t have a passport at the time to see them.

So I did. The one recurring thing I do every time I visit a family is I take a family photo. Then I print and share that with their family across the world. It’s a simple act, but it’s so special to see the way they cherish these photos. I went to Malaysia, Thailand, and the Netherlands.

At the time, they still had family members in Rakhine State, Myanmar.

The violence in Myanmar forced over 600,000 Rohingya refugees to flee to Bangladesh in August 2017. My Rohingya friends’ family members were forced to flee as well.
I reunited with their family members in 2018 in Bangladesh (which inspired our children’s book).
Confronted by the reality of life in a refugee camp and the lack of learning opportunities, Books Unbound started to take shape. I wanted to create a resource for Rohingya children in the refugee camp that would allow them to study anywhere, at any time.

I started by crowdsourcing artists around the world to develop our first product: a Rohingya Picture Dictionary. Once we finalized this, we crowdfunded enough money to get our pilot project launched. I spent a few months in Bangladesh to pilot the distribution and implementation of our first product.

We found independent teachers who were teaching classes in their private homes, but lacked basic learning materials. We equipped them with our resource and designed teacher trainings to give them lesson plan ideas and encourage more critical thinking activities.

I realized that this model could work for marginalized communities all over the world – not just in the Rohingya community. We started to expand our product line.

We currently work in Rohingya, Bangla, Afghan, Ukrainian, and Syrian communities. We develop our own products and design custom materials for international NGOs.

We will continue to expand our work to more communities around the world who are in need of learning materials that provide representation and preservation for the culture.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in Cape Town, where my nomadic lifestyle was sparked from excursions all over southern Africa. After a few bumps in the road, I learned to carve my path the non-traditional way. After high school, I moved to Thailand to work with Burmese migrants and Rohingya refugees. A series of events led me to traverse the world in search of my Rohingya friends’ family members who fled for their lives and are now labeled as refugees. As I traveled to reunite with them, I started documenting the journey along the way.
Reuniting with my Rohingya friends inspired me to start my social enterprise, Books Unbound – to develop contextualized learning materials for refugees.

What is Books Unbound? Essentially, we’re the go-to “cartoonizers” of the humanitarian field. We create representation through cartoonization for displaced communities in need of cultural preservation and informal resources.

We’re a diverse team of content creators around the world, many of whom are refugees themselves. We work with photographers, artists, translators, and educators who are dedicated to providing displaced communities with accessible, contextualized learning opportunities.

We conduct in-depth research on the target community and work directly with the local community to design culturally sensitive, informal learning materials. These learning materials are implemented into the target community through independent teachers who go through our teacher trainings. We sell our own products, offer teacher trainings, and work as education consultants to design custom projects for organizations and companies.

Our pilot project was designed for the Rohingya community and launched in the world’s largest refugee camp in Kutupalong, Bangladesh. Since then, we have expanded to other communities around the world – Afghan, Ukrainian, Bangla, Syrian, and hopefully more in the future. My work has taken me to Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Ecuador, Spain, Colombia, Nepal, Greece, among others.

Not only do we work in refugee camps abroad, but we also have products available to incoming refugees in the US. Our most popular product is the Afghan Picture Dictionary, which was designed specifically for Afghans coming to the US. It highlights some common topics and scenes they will see when moving to the US, but contextualized with Afghan cartoons to provide a sense of familiarity.

We build out products based on demand, so our customer feedback is extremely crucial as we continue to expand. Our products include Picture Dictionaries, Teacher Guides, Coloring Books, Women’s Health Books, and more.

Our simple approach allows us to dip our toes into an endless pool of topics, reaching both literate and illiterate learners in a culturally sensitive way.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

My job revolves around building strong relationships, which is crucial in every community I engage with. To achieve this, I frequently travel to different locations, where I connect with community members and actively participate in the target community to collect firsthand feedback and strengthen my team.

Due to the highly specialized nature of our work and its niche market, there are only a limited number of businesses that can be considered competitors. This unique positioning simplifies the process of building a reputation because there are few organizations offering similar services as ours.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

Our customer base consists of individuals who are deeply committed to serving displaced or marginalized populations. Our product designs are shaped by the feedback and requests we receive from our existing customers. Given our current small-scale operations, I personally reach out to every new customer who purchases one of our products.

This outreach serves as an opportunity to express our gratitude for their support and to gain insights into the communities they work with and how they are utilizing our resources. It’s important to me to maintain a close connection with our clients and convey the value we place on their work within refugee and displaced communities.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.books-unbound.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/books__unbound/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/booksunbound
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/68157948/admin/feed/posts/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpA7dM1pouL9zKaGUPHJDQw
• Other: https://books-unbound.myshopify.com/

Image Credits
Nihab Rahman (https://www.nihabrahman.com/) Hailey Sadler (https://www.haileysadler.com/) Sophie Danielson (https://sophieskipstown.com/)