In the press: A Refuge for Vulnerable Children by The Berliner

The Berliner published a piece on lilipad library in January 2026. Here is a snippet from the full article. Head to The Berliner to read the whole piece.

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As a child growing up in 1990s Casablanca, Sara Arsalane was painfully shy. At home, nobody read much – her parents were doctors, otherwise engaged – but her grandfather’s tales about the French classics intrigued her. As soon as Arsalane began to read, she was hooked. But as her world expanded, what seemed like the perfect solitary solace for a shy child took an unexpected turn.

“I was reading so much that I realised, actually, I didn’t want to be shy,” Arsalane says, laughing. “I forced myself to become an extrovert. Books really changed my life. Somehow, that stayed in the back of my mind.”

Her newly minted extrovert skills took her from her home in Morocco to business school in Paris, then on to high-end management and tech jobs in Berlin, the US, Hong Kong and Berlin again. But the call of the social sector, and her sense of the outsized role books had played in her life, never left her.

‘Giving back’ is a phrase used more than it is achieved. Many of us have good intentions; few of us make good on that idealism. Arsalane is one of the few.

“It was only a matter of time before I was going to wake up and think, ‘What am I doing every day?’” she says. “Back in 2015, when a lot of asylum-seekers were arriving in Berlin, my boyfriend and I volunteered in an emergency shelter. We were just cleaning dishes but it was pretty clear to me that, in these huge sports halls, there was no privacy. It was winter. What are kids actually meant to do there? That was really the very beginning. I just thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have little reading corners that parents can go to, and for the kids to have books in their native language, something familiar?”

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Original article published on The Berliner on 26 January 2026.
Author: Louise East