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?”
READING IS BELIEVING
In the autumn of 2025, Arsalane and I met up at bUm, a community coworking space and the headquarters of Lilipad, the Berlin-based non-profit she founded nine years ago. The clue to Lilipad’s mission is in the first part of its name: ‘lili’ – a mash-up of the words ‘little’ and ‘library’. Arsalane and her team of part-timers, volunteers and fundraisers create spaces for kids to read, retreat or release energy. A prototype of Lilipad library opened in Uganda in 2017. Now, there are 12 libraries in Berlin and five in Morocco, with funding recently secured to expand two existing libraries in Paris and establish one in Sicily.
Some are comprehensive small libraries, complete with a Lilipad-funded librarian on hand for homework help; others are simple reading corners with a few shelves of curated books. What unites all of the Lilipad libraries is their emphasis on children who are at risk of exclusion, whether because they’re growing up in one of Berlin’s many refugee accommodations or because they’re girls living in protection centres in Morocco.
“Our priority is always children living in shelters and institutional care settings, because that’s where the highest need is,” Arsalane explains. “Reading has so many positive effects – academic performance, better prospects in life, all these things. But I don’t think it’s the main objective of our work. What we really focus on is that feeling of well-being and self-confidence.
“The impact we’re seeking is that kids believe in themselves a bit more, that they see themselves as capable of creating nice things, of engaging with culture, with art, with books, and that they don’t feel intimidated, because ultimately, that builds their resilience. It’s important that the circumstances in which they live don’t define them forever. One day, they’ll leave the shelter.”
INTEGRATION, PARTICIPATION, CELEBRATION
On a squally Sunday last September, I cycled down to Spore Initiative, a cultural centre on Hermannstrasse. It was hosting an exhibition of work created in a refugee accommodation centre during a Lilipad workshop series. Called Calligraffiti, the workshops had combined what Arsalane described as a “heritage artform” – in this case, Arabic calligraphy – and an urban one, graffiti. Previous workshops offered poetry and rapping, and they’re contemplating a new one that would weave traditional oral storytelling into podcasting.
“We talk about integration and participation, but it’s also fine to celebrate the cultural identity of the kids and where they come from,” Arsalane said. “They’re being fed all these negative narratives about themselves. It’s important to offer a counter narrative of, ‘You are celebrated and don’t have to change, and you can still be the model German citizen. Those things are not mutually exclusive.’”
‘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.
I heard the exhibition long before I saw it, the stairwell echoing with the wild hullabaloo of kids on a day out. Inside, snippets of paper and feathers flew off a craft table, and decimated Erdnussflips lay in crumbs on the floor. In between showers, the sun shone, and concertina glass doors had been pushed back to allow access to a roof terrace, decked out with plants, rugs and canvases bright with spray paint. Children whooshed past, occasionally swooping in to grab a paint aerosol from the tempting stack near the door or to tease one of the workshop facilitators.
Although this was a library-run event, there wasn’t a book in sight. Early on, Arsalane and the Lilipad team realised that kids of all stripes, but particularly those in loud and overpopulated spaces, prioritise fun over focus. “The books are there. The library is a safe space. But it’s not only about reading, because reading can feel a bit intimidating, especially with kids who may have difficult backgrounds and face various layers of trauma,” Arsalane explained. “We programme workshops around the library and the books, so that slowly they start thinking, ‘Oh, I can do this. I can read.’”
TWO-WAY TEACHING
I got talking to Berlin-based Syrian rapper and sound engineer Taha Sheik Diek, who led the rap and poetry workshop for Lilipad and has been working with the kids for nearly five years. When the energy at Spore began to spiral, Sheik Diek channelled it into a round of body percussion with the children. At the tell-tale rattle of a pilfered aerosol can, he whipped around to rescue it with a laugh and a joke in Arabic.
When Lilipad has funding in place, Sheik Diek leads workshops in rapping and music production. When it doesn’t, he visits the kids on a voluntary basis anyway. After noticing that many of the children were in a second-language trough, stuck between what’s spoken at home and in school, he initiated weekly Arabic classes.
“Some people go to therapists because therapists will tell you what you don’t like to hear. That’s what the kids do,” Taha said, laughing. “They ask very existential questions, like, ‘Why are you Muslim? Why do you have a tattoo?’ Sometimes you think, ‘I really don’t know the answer to that.’ It’s a very nice spark of conversation.”
For Lebanese tattoo and graffiti artist Mohammad Mhanna, who facilitated the Calligraffiti series, this wasn’t his first teaching job, but it was his first time teaching in a refugee accommodation. Faced with what he described as “a lot of main character energy”, he called his mother, an experienced teacher back in Beirut, and asked for tips.
“My personal way of looking at it is that these kids came from war countries. They’ve lived through a lot of chaos, and they didn’t see the beauty of calmness,” said Mhanna. One of the tricks his mother suggested was to wrap the work table in black: “It really worked. Their whole focus went to the white paper.” By the end of the workshop series, Mhanna was “always witnessing wonder. How they moved, how they suddenly aligned, how they collaborated with us. They really wanted the thing to work.”
LIFE BEYOND CIRCUMSTANCES
In the months after the event at Spore, as autumn turned into winter, life grew increasingly inhospitable for refugees in Berlin. In September, an information session to discuss a proposed new accommodation centre in Neukölln was hijacked by AfD supporters, who shouted down Cansel Kiziltepe, the SPD senator for integration. Two months later, the ruling CDU/SPD coalition rolled back its March 2024 proposal to build 16 new accommodation centres.
Hopefully, they leave with a feeling of being welcome and having fun, of feeling like there are kind aspects of the world, and of living in Germany, that aren’t always so prevalent in their day-to-day lived experiences.
In November, Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggested that Germany’s 1.3 million Syrian refugees, many of whom have been living here for 10 years, should now return to Syria. Merz’s earlier remarks, implying Germany’s supposedly blighted cityscapes could be solved by large-scale repatriations, were seen by many as a far-right dog whistle. With five state elections coming up in Germany this year [2026], including Berlin in September, and support for AfD increasing across Germany, anti-migrant rhetoric is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
It’s hard to think of those joyous children swirling around that cultural centre, each one a unique unit of pure potential, and to realise that for some, those same children are a problem, a threat and a nuisance. The short-sightedness of that viewpoint is perfectly encapsulated by Lilipad itself, a non-profit founded and run by migrants of all stripes, giving back to the city of Berlin in spades.
Back in September, as the Spore event drew to a close, I got talking to Nicky Böhm – cultural project manager, Lilipad board member and another Berlin-based migrant (of British/Nigerian/German heritage) – about the work Lilipad undertakes. “All kids should have the opportunity to experience worlds and life views beyond their circumstances,” she said. “Hopefully, they leave with a feeling of being welcome and having fun, of feeling like there are kind aspects of the world, and of living in Germany, that aren’t always so prevalent in their day-to-day lived experiences.”
I also chatted to one of the Calligraffiti workshop participants, who didn’t feel like giving me his name. The workshops were cool, he told me, both the music one and the graffiti one. He liked where he lived because he could play with his friends, and he liked Taha and Mo. He did have one piece of feedback for Lilipad though: “The next workshop should be football.”
Follow Lilipad @lilipadlibrary and donate or get involved at lilipadlibrary.org
