About us
It started with books.
In 2018 a random American brought one hundred pounds of used books to a new library in a slum neighborhood of Jos, Nigeria called Jenta.
It was in this neighborhood, in a tiny room with two small tables, three chairs, and a few dozen stacks of books, that a person could find the only public library in a city of nearly a million people.
These were the humble beginnings of the Jenta Reads Community Library, a grassroots effort started and maintained by faith, by an exceptional team of young people seeking to #ChangeTheNarrative of their own community.
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God provided such that today Jenta Reads has its own three-room facility with tables, chairs, bookcases, computers, thousands of books, and a dedicated team of volunteers who lead all kinds of community programs.
They have truly changed the narrative. Now Jenta is known all over Nigeria as the neighborhood with a library. And this narrative has spread, leading to multiple spinoff libraries in Jos, and even in other places in Nigeria.
…which led to stories.
After the 2018 book delivery, which is an amazing story in its own right, we started a website to collect more stories of faith—stories that demonstrate the reality of God in our daily lives.
We built a database of more than 1,200 Christian biographies and spiritual testimonies both by scanning books and by accessing public domain texts on the Internet.
Using data science to analyze this database, we have been able to identify and categorize more than 2,300 stories that empirically demonstrate the reality of God and the truth of His teachings. The entire project is summarized by the question, Who has ever trusted God like that?
…which led to more books.
The data science work led to the discovery of dozens of wonderful, but long-forgotten books in the public domain. The work also led to the discovery of important people for whom there is no biography.
Walking Together Press was founded to accomplish three broad goals:
- To re-introduce compelling stories, people, and public domain books to a new generation
- To provide financial contributions to African grassroots libraries through global book sales
- To provide physical library editions of books to African grassroots libraries and schools
