Featured
Christie Chung, a professor and director of the Mills Institute on Northeastern’s Oakland campus, wrote “Inspire to Include” with her 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, after the youngster was inspired by seeing her mother working on manuscripts.
Olivia Ono always sees her mom, Christie Chung, writing.
The associate dean for research, scholarship and partnerships at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus, Chung is working on a book and has written many academic articles.
Her work piqued her 8-year-old daughter’s interest. So the mother-daughter duo decided to combine what Chung called “their superpowers” and write their own book to give as a gift during the holidays.
“We wanted to do something meaningful and fun together,” says Chung, who is also the executive director of the Mills Institute on Northeastern’s Oakland campus. “As mother and daughter, we always find fun projects to do. And one of the most important things to me is that we’re doing something meaningful, but something good for the world. For Olivia, it was really important for her to do something kind to make the world a better place.”
“Inspire to Include” combines stories and calls-to-actions for kindness, inclusion and gratitude with memory games in each chapter. The exercises in the book include drawing prompts and story recalls that Chung came up with using her background in cognitive psychology.
Rather than writing a more fictional narrative, Chung says she wanted to make the book more of an inspirational how-to for young children, so she used her expertise as a cognitive psychologist to add in prompts for young readers to recall memories of times they helped others as a way to help them gain perspective on how others might be feeling.
“The most important piece of each chapter is the action piece,” Chung says. “And that actually came to be because of my work in building the Mills Institute, because one of the most important things I realized is that we actually apply what we learn. … So the last piece within each chapter is how would you apply this learning in your real life?”
The idea for the book came from Chung and Ono’s bedtime conversations about friendship. Ono came up with the ideas for all the chapters.
“The Mills Institute is actually all about creating a space to really bring people together to talk about kindness and belonging, so she hears me talking about equity and justice all the time,” Chung says. “Those topics are often top of our mind, so because of that, we realized that’s the message we want to spread. She tells a lot of stories, so I thought ‘Why not capture that?’ … We could learn so much from kids and their view of the world is very pure. I feel like it’s very unbiased. So I wanted to capture that.”
The self-published book is now available for purchase on Amazon.
Chung says Ono was inspired to get in on the project in part because of her love of reading. The young girl loves books and counts cartoonist Raina Telgemeier among her favorite authors. But Chung says her daughter felt there wasn’t really a book out there like “Inspire to Include.”
“Whenever we see a gap in society, I tell her ‘Why don’t we do this?’” Chung says. “If there isn’t one, we should create it. It’s the kind of entrepreneurial mindset that we often tell our students about at Northeastern, so I thought ‘Why not model that?’”
Chung says the pair was able to pull together in about a month in a “really fun” process that included both learning from each other. Chung taught her daughter about the world of publishing and artificial intelligence while she in turn learned more about a child’s perspective.
Going forward, Chung says, Ono wants to write more books to distribute during the holidays to give as gifts.
“In some ways, it’s her gift to her friends and to the world,” Chung says. “And it was really interesting. I asked her what kind of messages she would like to give to people out there, so she told me something about computers. She was like ‘There are many things that AI and computers can’t do, so I’m going to write a book about that.’”