CULTIVATING READING AS A SOCIAL ACTIVITY

Soma Book Club is a Kampala based book club established in August 2022 for the purpose of bringing avid readers and aspiring readers like together to read books and further cultivate reading as a social activity.

We at Soma pride ourselves on the diversity of our readers, which is cultivated by choosing a new Book Club Leader every month by means of a secret raffle. One of our key tenets of celebrating diversity, is symbolised by our membership which is not comprised of a pre-existing friendship group, rather through social media, we were able to connect and form a book club of men and women of different ages, occupations and reading books of all varieties (e.g social commentary, novels, short stories and biographies).

Alongside, our passion for encouraging reading amongst our members, we endeavour to encourage and promote reading in our local communities. Specifically, each month our members each donate Shs 20,000 or more to a School in the neighbourhood of the Book Club Leader. Constant rotation of leader’s month after month, has meant for the past 8 months we have donated to UPE (Universal Primary Education) School in the neighbourhoods of Ntinda, Luzira and Muyenga and have donated around 100 books to local schools..

Recently we partnered with the Rotary Club of Kampala Springs and donated over 25 books to Luzira Church of Uganda Primary School, a Universal Primary Education School, located on the edge of the leafy suburb. It was a great opportunity to build upon the work the Rotary Club completed by building the school a modern library. We look forward to further partnering with the Rotary Club of Kampala Springs and finding new avenues to support children’s literacy in under privileged neighbourhoods and caring for community.