So happy we got to participate in the AZ Governor's Youth Commission Pathways to Sustainability career exploration hub last week! Huge thank you to our interns Spencer, Bhavana and Caitlin for sharing their SolarSPELL experiences with so many awesome young changemakers!
#AZGYC #EarthMonth #SDG
🥈 We won silver at last night's Edison Awards! It's such an honor to be recognized for Cultural Impact and Education, alongside such a star-studded group of innovators. 💡 Thank you so much for recognizing the efforts of our staff, students, interns, volunteers & partners! @edisonawards.bsky.social
Our newest library collection supports community-led development efforts in Senegal. Head to our blog to learn more about how we worked with our partners at Tostan to build new this library and to lead our most robust train-the-trainer workshop yet: solarspell.org/tostan-pilot...
#ASU Global Technology & Development student Spencer Danzig has been supporting our Qualitative Data Analysis team with transcribing, coding, & analyzing interviews; updating the team’s codebook & interview questions; and working on academic papers. Thanks, Spencer, for your thoughtful research!
SolarSPELL is now in Senegal! Last week, we led a train-the-trainer with Tostan facilitators, who will use the digital libraries in their Community Empowerment Program. Our first collection in French & Pulaar, this library was curated to support Tostan's adult education curriculum.
SolarSPELL is a finalist for the 2026 Edison Awards in the Cultural Impact & Education category! It's an honor to be recognized alongside such an impressive group of innovators, and we can't wait to celebrate at the Edison Awards Gala this spring. #1innovation
edisonawards.com/finalists/?u...
Last month, we trained the new cohort of Peace Corps Vanuatu Volunteers (PCVs) & their local counterparts. 🇻🇺 We also visited 2 of the PCVs we trained in September — Maggie uses the library to prepare health trainings & Baylea's school uses SolarSPELL to find teaching materials for their students.
Incredibly proud to announce that SolarSPELL has won the Global Education Prize at the 2025 QS #ReimagineEducation Awards! It's a huge honor to be selected from pool of 1,656 submissions & we're so excited to think about how many more learners we'll be able to reach thanks to this award! 🎉
We're proud to announce that out of nearly 800 submissions, SolarSPELL has been selected as one of the top 100 education innovations to watch out for in 2026! Check us out in the #HundrEDGlobalCollection from HundrED!
Download the report at: hundred.org/.../hundred-...
We've been hard at work this year developing our 1st library collection for #WestAfrica with our partners at Tostan! Our recent workshop + content curation training with them in Senegal was a huge success, and we're so excited to launch this pilot next year!
#CommunityEmpowerment #DigitalLibrary
😬How can we process health information if we're already freaked out?
🧠"Being aware in the time of stress to say, 'I’m not going to remember this, let me put it over there so I can come back to it,'" advises Dr. Heather Ross co-director of @asu-solarspell.bsky.social Health.
In an interview with ABC15, SolarSPELL co-founder Laura Hosman shared, "The people who are using our libraries are really the inspiration for why we continue to improve the content on the library all the time."
www.abc15.com/weather/impa...
Meet Nameera, an #ASU sophomore pursuing a BA in Global Studies & a BS in Economics. As a Cultural Content Curator, she is expanding access to locally relevant educational materials, helping learners see more of themselves in the library. 🌍 Thank you for your dedication, Nameera!
Missed our fall #newsletter last month? 📰 Catch up on our latest headlines, like new agricultural impact data, returning to Vanuatu, and our largest intern cohort to date: bit.ly/SPELLnews-FA25
Never miss an update by signing up for our newsletter at solarspell.org/newsletter
We’re excited to feature Sean, an #ASU alum who is helping us make our libraries more accessible and user-friendly! Learn about his experience interning with SolarSPELL: solarspell.org/designing-fo...
@asuengineering.bsky.social
#StudentSuccess #GlobalImpact #UserExperience #Accessibility
"We feel like we can do one better than the Internet because libraries are curated information," said SolarSPELL co-founder Laura Hosman in an interview with @kjzz.org. "It’s the right information for the right people at the right time."
#TIMEBestInventions #ASU #1innovation #SocialImpact
Laura Hosman & co-director of SolarSPELL Health, Heather Ross, spoke to Doing Well News about the best ways to relay #HealthInformation to people in stressful or low-resource situations, describing our offline digital health library as an example. 🩺
doingwellnews.substack.com/p/health-inf...
Proud to be included in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025 list in the #SocialImpact category! This recognition will help open doors for us to reach more offline learners with the information & skills they need to create a better future.
time.com/collections/...
#TIMEBestInventions #ASU #1innovation
Thank you to the amazing volunteers who participated in this weekend's Curate-a-Thon, curating & tagging 82 new resources for our Pacific Islands education library! When we return to Vanuatu next month, we'll now be able to update libraries with new videos, national curricula & Bislama storybooks. 📚
Thrilled to share our very own Laura Hosman has been shortlisted for the 2025 Open Education Awards! awards.oeglobal.org/2025-finalis...
Congratulations, Laura, and all of the other incredible finalists on this well deserved honor!
#OEGlobal #OEAwards25 #OpenEducation #EdTech #1innovation
Thanks to B2R Farms Fellows & #SolarSPELL libraries, thousands of Rwandan farmers have increased their yields using #ConservationAgriculture (CA) — >56% on average! What's more, these farmers went on to teach CA to 2.5x more of the peers. Read more at solarspell.org/solarspell-l...
Abby, an #ASU Media Arts & Sciences major and Graphic Design Intern designs library banners and creates illustrations that celebrate the culture, community & landscapes of the communities where we work. Thank you, Abby for your dedication to supporting SolarSPELL's mission!
SolarSPELL has been shortlisted for the Access, Diversity & Inclusion Award at the #QSReimagine Education Awards! 🏅 Of >1,600 submissions, we're honored to be ranked in the top 20% among such an inspiring group of innovators! Thanks to all who have contributed to our mission to make this possible.
10 years ago we piloted the very first SolarSPELL libraries in Vanuatu & Micronesia. This week we returned to Vanuatu for the first time since 2020 to train the next generation of Peace Corps Volunteers on our new-and-improved libraries! 🎉 Stay tuned for more as we celebrate our 10-year anniversary!
So grateful to have participated in another inspiring #STEMtasticAdventures! It was a privilege to share the stage with fellow innovators & speak about both SolarSPELL's offline-first approach to empowering #STEMeducation & our pioneering work to create offline #AI learning tools for rural schools.
Happy #InternationalLiteracyDay! We're proud to support literacy champions like librarian Claudine by empowering them with locally relevant storybooks. You can empower more librarians by helping us bring SolarSPELL digital libraries to 5 rural Rwandan communities: www.gofundme.com/f/empower-rw...
#ImpactResults: Training in conservation agriculture boosts farmers' maize yields by 47.5% over traditional practices; when paired with SolarSPELL, they gain an additional 9%! PLUS, SolarSPELL users went on to teach and additional 108 farmers on average!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDLD...
While in Rwanda, we also met with Appolo to talk more about the communities that will be receiving SolarSPELL #libraries. Thanks to your support, we now have 1 library funded, just 4 more to go! We hope you'll continue to help by sharing with friends & family: www.gofundme.com/f/empower-rw... 😊
🌱 Recently got to present to all 93 B2R Farms Fellows, who've been using SolarSPELL to help train farmers in #ConservationAgriculture. We shared both insights from farmer survey data & news from partners in South Sudan. Great to meet new fellows & see familiar faces!
#Training #DigitalLibrary #SDGs
If you missed our last #newsletter, head to bit.ly/SPELLnews-SU25 to get caught up: Meet our new digital librarian, learn about our fundraiser to bring more SolarSPELLs to Rwanda & hear from some of our stellar interns! Never miss an update by subscribing to our newsletter: solarspell.org/newsletter
