What Is Make A Way Media?

For a long time, the answer to the question What does Make A Way Media do? was pretty simple.

We make books.

More specifically, we created diverse books because we believed children deserved to see themselves in stories. They deserved to see children who looked like them being brave, kind, adventurous, imaginative, trustworthy, loved… and sometimes saving the day.

We believed then, and we believe now, that books do much more than teach children how to read.

Stories help people.

They help children understand who they are. They introduce us to people whose lives may look nothing like our own. They build literacy, imagination, empathy, identity, and hope.

That work is still at the heart of Make A Way Media, but something has happened over the years. We grew. Not away from that mission, but deeper into it.

So, what is Make A Way Media now?

Make A Way Media is a hope-centered media and education company.

We create books, tools, programs, media, experiences, and communities designed to help people see possibility—for themselves and for one another—and take steps toward it.

And when we look at everything we do through that lens, something becomes very clear…

The work isn’t disconnected at all:

• The child who needs to see themselves as the hero in a book.
• The adult who has stopped believing a different life is possible.
• The artist pursuing an enormous dream while trying not to lose themselves along the way.
• The writer who needs a place to create and belong.
• The student trying to manage stress while working toward something difficult.
• The family that deserves access to books regardless of their ZIP code.

They are all asking some version of the same question:

Is there a way forward for me?

We want our work to help people answer:

Yes. Let’s find that way forward together.

The Name Makes More Sense Than Ever

There is something beautiful about realizing that the name we chose years ago still describes the company we are becoming.

Make A Way.

When children don’t see themselves represented in books, we make a way.

When communities don’t have equitable access to books and literary experiences, we make a way.

When someone cannot imagine how their life gets from where they are to where they desperately want to be, we help them look for a way.

When an artist needs support for the person underneath all that ambition, we make a way.

When writers need space, opportunity, and community, we make a way.

When life gives people very good reasons to despair, we keep looking for a way toward hope.

That is the thread running through everything we do.

Stories Build People

Books are not the old Make A Way Media. They are foundational to Make A Way Media.

We believe children deserve diverse stories because representation shapes identity and stories help teach us who belongs. We believe literacy access is about far more than academic achievement. And we believe books can help human beings practice something our world desperately needs: seeing life through someone else’s eyes. So, we are recommitting ourselves to talking about our books, not simply when a new one is released, but year after year.

We’ll tell you why we created them. We’ll talk about the conversations you can have after reading them. We’ll share the ideas behind them. We’ll help parents, teachers, librarians, and caregivers use books to talk about empathy, courage, identity, kindness, dreams, hope, and belonging.

A good book doesn’t stop being useful because its launch campaign ended, and neither should the conversation around it.

Hope Is a Skill

As our work expanded beyond children’s books, we kept returning to hope. Not hope as wishful thinking or pretending everything is fine. We became interested in what people actually do when they need hope:

• How do we keep dreaming when life hasn’t gone according to plan?
• How do we move when we feel stuck?
• How do we imagine something we cannot see yet?
• How do we take one step when we don’t know the next ten?

That work now lives in our books and workbooks, the How to Dream podcast, Hoping Skills™, the Hope Meter™, courses, resources, and other tools designed to help people practice hope and put their dreams in motion. The people at Make A Way Media believe that hope isn’t something we find… sometimes it is something we build.

Mental Health Belongs in Everyday Life

We also believe people shouldn’t have to reach a crisis before they learn how to care for their minds. Mental wellness belongs in schools and workplaces. It belongs in creative spaces and in conversations about dreams, parenting, education, ambition, stress, disappointment, and success.

Our work includes practical, accessible mental wellness education designed to help people understand themselves, manage stress, recognize burnout, strengthen resilience, and care for the person underneath everything they are trying to accomplish. Mental health tools shouldn’t be reserved for our hardest days.

Dreamers Need More Than Encouragement

We love dreams around here. Big ones. Tiny ones. Improbable ones. Dreams you’ve told everybody about and dreams you are almost embarrassed to admit you still have. And we know that encouragement alone is not enough.

Dreamers need tools. And structure. Dreamers need spaces where they can learn and a group of people who understand the peculiar combination of courage, vulnerability, rejection, discipline, uncertainty, and hope required to create something that doesn’t exist yet.

That belief shows up throughout our work from How to Dream to The Steady Artist to Louisville Writers House and the resources we create for writers, artists, students, and other people trying to build something. We want to encourage dreams, but we also want to help people do something with them.

Community Helps Us Make A Way

And then there is community. Community is more important than ever because eventually we learned something else:

Sometimes the path forward isn’t something you make alone, it’s something we make for one another.

That belief is visible in the Louisville Book Festival, Louisville Writers House, our literacy work, partnerships, events, educational programs, book donations, author opportunities, and community resources. We believe access to books matters. We believe creative spaces matter. We believe gathering around stories matters. And we believe communities become stronger when more people have the opportunity to read, create, imagine, and be heard.

One Company. One Idea.

From the outside, Make A Way Media may look like a company doing a lot of different things.

Books.

Podcasts.

Courses.

Mental wellness programs.

Creative communities.

Literacy initiatives.

Resources for dreamers.

But we don’t see a collection of unrelated projects when we look at this list.

We see one idea expressed in many different ways:

People need help seeing what is possible. And a story or a book or a podcast or a documentary, and certainly, a room full of writers can do that. A child finding a book with someone who looks like them on the cover can absolutely do that.

So perhaps the simplest way to explain Make A Way Media today is this:

We help people see possibility—and make a way toward it.

Our work is built around five beliefs:

Stories build people.
Hope is a skill.
Mental health belongs in everyday life.
Dreamers need structure.
Community helps us make a way.

These beliefs will guide what we create next and these beliefs will also lead us back to where we started. To books. To stories. To the belief that what we read can change what we imagine and what we imagine can change what we believe is possible.

Make A Way Media has grown.

Our mission hasn’t disappeared inside that growth.

We are just getting to see just how big the mission was all along.