About this item
Sammy Ikua Gachagua had lost his father to illness, his mother to abandonment, and his home to poverty. By age ten, he was living in a shack with seven other children and very little food. He entered an orphanage seeing it as a miracle with three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, and clothes on his back.When Claire Diaz-Ortiz arrived in Kenya at the end of an around-the-world journey, she decided to stay the night, climb Mt. Kenya, then head back home. She entered an orphanage seeing it as little more than a free place to spend the night before her mountain trek. God had other plans. Hope Runs is the emotional story of an American tourist, a Kenyan orphan, and the day that would change the course of both of their lives forever. It's about what it means to live in the now when the world is falling down around you.
About the Author
Claire Díaz-Ortiz is an author, speaker, and technology innovator who has been named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. Claire was an early employee at Twitter, where she was hired to lead corporate social innovation.
In Claire's work, she has been called everything from "The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter" (Wired) and "Twitter's Pontiff Recruitment Chief" (The Washington Post) to a "Force for Good" (Forbes) and one of the "Ten Most Generous in Social Media" (Fast Company) . Claire is also known for the precarious honor of being the first to live-tweet her own child's birth. (Hello, @Lucia!)
Claire is the author of six books, including Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet at a Time, which explores the TWEET model framework she is known for developing to help organizations and individuals best excel on Twitter. She has also written Hope Runs: An American Tourist, A Kenyan Boy, a Journey of Redemption; Greater Expectations: Succeed (and Stay Sane) in an On-Demand, All-Access, Always-On Age; The Better Life; Design Your Day: Be More Productive, Set Better Goals, and Live Life on Purpose and a handful of ebooks.
She is a frequent international speaker on business, innovation and social media, and has been invited to deliver trainings and keynotes at such varied organizations and events as The United Nations, Verizon, Toyota, South by Southwest, TEDx, The Mashable Social Good Summit, and many others.
Her popular business blog at www.ClaireDiazOrtiz.com boasts more than 100,000 monthly readers. She is also a LinkedIn Influencer, one of 300 hundred global leaders chosen to provide original content for the LinkedIn platform.
Claire holds an MBA from Oxford University, where she was a Skoll Foundation Scholar for Social Entrepreneurship, and has a BA and an MA in Anthropology from Stanford University.
She is the co-founder of Hope Runs, a non-profit organization operating in AIDS orphanages in Kenya.
Claire has lived on four continents and traveled to more than fifty countries. She used to run marathons, but now it makes her tired just to think about that. She is a foster mom to a Kenyan teen, an extreme introvert, and a crazy reader (she reads 200 books a year) . She also boasts an unnatural passion for tiny houses and rooibos tea.
She has appeared widely in major television and print news sources like CNN, BBC, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Good Morning America, The Today Show, the Washington Post, Fortune, Forbes, Wired and many others.
Find her via @claire on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or at claire@clairediazortiz.com.
