THE WOMEN’S ISSUE
two weeks I had 6,000 books in my garage. Within two months I had 10,000, and it just kept going. I started visiting local places that worked with low-income kids, setting up bookshelves, and in about six months, I had a dozen distribution sites. I realized then that there was more to this than just a little idea I wanted to experiment with – it felt like it had staying power. I want every child to have that solace of books, that tool for developing
empathy, that tool for dreaming about a world bigger than your own world. What gets me out of bed in the morning is a very tangible image: knowing that there are over a quarter of a million books out in our community with that little Book Harvest sticker on them that are by the bedsides of kids and on the coffee tables of families. I know that every morning when I wake up, there are parents out there reading books to their babies and toddlers that they wouldn’t otherwise have.” – as told to Amanda MacLaren
The Breakdown
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BOOKS ON BREAK Students at four Durham Elementary schools – Forest View, Glenn, Lakewood and Y.E. Smith – who are on free- or reduced-lunch plans are gifted a string backpack and allowed to pick out 10 books during a pop-up bookstore before school lets out for the summer. Book Harvest also serves schools in Chapel Hill-Carrboro and will send 2,000 kids home with 20,000 books this summer. “Low-income kids suffer a 40% to 50% learning loss over the summer,” Ginger says. “We can help them cut that loss by half or more by providing them with books.”
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COMMUNITY BOOK BANK PARTNER SITES 29 locations, including Urban Ministries of Durham, Welcome Baby, Walltown Neighborhood Clinic, Center for Child and Family Health and more, receive approximately 1,500 books each week.
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BOOK BABIES Families with newborns who are Medicaid eligible are given 10 books every six months until the child begins kindergarten. The first cohort enrolled in 2013 with 50 families, followed by another 50 in 2014 and will have to be capped at 60 families this year. “The thing that has always struck me as really unfortunate is that we know that 80% of a child’s brain development takes place within the first three years,” Ginger says. “What we should be doing is pouring tons of resources into those years.”
More than 350,000 books have been donated to Book Harvest since its inception in 2011, and kids have been able to take home more than 262,000 of those books.
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