When Tatiana learned at age 12 that 75 percent of children in some African countries could not read and lacked access to books, she immediately took action. She led a solo book drive on the lawn of her community’s children’s library to collect thousands of books that now serve 62 schools and villages in Botswana and Lesotho. Fueled by her initial success and her successful collaboration with the African Library Project, she soon founded her own nonprofit organization, Spread the Words, to increase early literacy around the world by helping children create school libraries in impoverished communities, support the libraries they’ve started, and bring digital curriculum and textbooks to schools that need them.

Today, Tatiana and Spread the Words have established libraries serving 99 African villages and primary schools where before there were none. 

After consulting with Silicon Valley engineers and digital content providers to provide African classrooms with the latest in digital classroom technology and free digital teaching materials, she created a digital projector system. She figured out how to run the projector with solar power to help teachers in remote areas with limited electricity. It holds 100,000 pages of lessons that can be projected on a screen, so all the children in the classroom can see it at once.

Tatiana is headed for Stanford next, but she's also looking ahead to a life of service. "One of the things that has really stuck with me throughout all my years is the saying that the purpose of life is a life of purpose. I just really feel that if I'm not busy doing something that I love or something that helps other people, that I'm not living quite as much as I could be."