The Listening Tree is a children’s bookstore created to perpetuate a love of literacy and learning in our global community. Located on Candler Road, owners Omar and Kimberly Finley, founded The Listening Tree to introduce the Black Voice into the American lexicon. Their children prompted them to focus on putting books that educate and inspire in the hands of young readers from toddlers through teens, especially Black youth.
Omar and Kimberly were frustrated with the book choices for their own children and decided to establish a company called Our Story Books Publishing. They wrote a book called “A World Of Our Own: The Beginning”. This book beautifully illustrates the first seven days of God’s creation! They sold 500 copies in less than 90 day’s and realized that they should continue writing children’s books for black children. While writing their 2nd book, “A World of Our Own: Noah The Righteous,” they noticed that their pace of writing children’s books wasn’t fast enough to provide consistently good books that depicted black children at the center of the story.
That frustration became the birth of The Listening Tree! The Listening Tree also boasts a Young Entrepreneurs Program that is already serving our young people, ages 8 – 16, in Decatur and Atlanta and teaching them how to own and operate their own businesses. We also serve the national and international community through our B-Boys and B-Girls Book Club! The B-Boys and B-Girls Club is designed to ensure that every child receives a minimum of 12 age and gender appropriate books per year that will challenge, teach and inspire him or her to excellence in every field of human endeavor! Each month every child receives a book along with a newsletter and access to a parent-controlled members-only online community/virtual classroom.