A Message From Our Board Chair and CEO

Since our humble beginning in two counties of Washington state in 1996, The Children’s Reading Foundation® has been dedicated to its mission to ensure all children learn to read early and well, specifically on grade level by the end of third grade. Today, we are a debt-free, national nonprofit helping hundreds of thousands of families and children in 25 states with our literacy and learning programs and educational messages. And nearly two decades later, our focus remains on engaging parents and caregivers during a child’s critical early learning years of birth through third grade. Fiscal Year 2015. The year was one of expansion and transition for The Children’s Reading Foundation. We continued our efforts to support families, schools and communities in raising readers and preparing every child for kindergarten. But our team doesn’t do this vital work alone. We’re proud to serve alongside our community-based chapters, READY! for Kindergarten® programs, and local grant partners all across America to achieve this mission.

The Children’s Reading Foundation network added a new chapter in Okanogan County, Washington, and 42 new READY! for Kindergarten school readiness programs in 13 states. We strengthened our efforts in high-need communities and furthered early literacy initiatives nationwide with a $3.8 million, two-year U.S. Department of Education Innovative Approaches to Literacy (IAL) grant for 2014 – 2016. We are honored to be the only national nonprofit selected for a second consecutive IAL grant following our previous award of $2.9 million for 2012 – 2014. Through the IAL grant, we expanded our school readiness program, READY! for Kindergarten, as well as our summer reading program, READ Up: Stop the Summer SlideSM. These proven programs facilitate a child’s development in ways that cultivate crucial early literacy and learning skills while strengthening relationships and self-confidence.

We also continued work on a supplement to our READY! for Kindergarten program, a mobile app to benefit children who lack access to our community-based programs. This new product will offer early learning games and resources for adults to guide children in learning key preliteracy and school readiness skills. At our annual conference, we were proud to award The Children’s Reading Foundation of Licking County, Ohio, as our 2015 Flagship Chapter Award recipient. Since it began in 2009, this chapter has had a major impact on the community and students it serves, and we’re excited to see them continue to make a difference. Fiscal year 2015 concluded the distinguished 20-year career of Nancy Kerr as President of The Children’s Reading Foundation. Her contributions are countless, and we’re fortunate to have her continue to serve on our national board of directors. 20th Anniversary Celebration. Looking ahead to 2016, we will be privileged to mark two decades of service to families and children from coast-to-coast. Throughout 2016, we’ll celebrate our 20th anniversary with our partners across the country. Our aim is to increase awareness about the importance of daily reading, talking and purposeful play beginning at birth, which nurtures a child’s development in ways that foster essential early literacy, math and social-emotional skills. We encourage you to visit our website, take the reading pledge and commit to reading with a child 20 minutes every day. And please join our anniversary celebration beginning January 2016 at ReadingFoundation.org.

Sincerely,

Paul Rosier Rick Donahoe Board Chair CEO