Magazine Literacy Bee

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Organizing a KinderHarvest magazine collection in your community is like a food drive, but you will be feeding children and families hungry to read and succeed. Here's how:

1. Find a program in your community to receive the magazines you collect. This could be a food pantry, a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, an early learning program like Headstart, or other after-school, reading, or literacy program. Find out how many people are served by the program, including their age, gender, and interests or needs in terms of the types of magazines. There are many online and community directories for these programs. Please be in touch if you need help finding programs to receive the magazines that you collect.
2. Collect recent issues of gently used magazines. Think of collection [img_assist|nid=62|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=171|height=177]points that are convenient for your neighbors - places where people go on a regular and frequent basis, such as the public library, a book or magazine store, a school, church, bank, or supermarket. Ask permission to set up a KinderHarvest magazine literacy collection bin. Think about where else you could collect recent magazines. For example, perhaps a supermarket would allow a magazine drive, which is very similar to a food drive. Shoppers receive a small flyer on the way into the grocery store announcing the magazine drive and can drop newly purchased magazines in a bin or cart on the way out of the store. Consumers can be encouraged to come back to drop-off their recent issues of magazines from home.
3. Remove labels from magazines, or use a black permanent marker to
   [img_assist|nid=26|title=Label a Child|desc=|link=url,http://magazineliteracy.org/?tp=ideas#label|align=left|width=100|height=35]blot out names and addresses. Then, print and post our magazine gift label in the same spot where the old label was. This protects the magazine donor's privacy, while giving the magazine to someone as something they can call their very own.
4. Deliver the magazines that you collect to the receiving program on a timely basis. Gather feedback from the program director so we can improve and grow the KinderHarvest program. Communicate what you are planning or what you have accomplished to the local media, so that others will learn about, support, and be inspired by your good work.
5. Contact us to let us know if you would write about the planning, organization, and execution of your project in our MagazineLiteracy.org ideas blog. This will also help to inspire and guide others who would like to organize a successful KinderHarvest magazine collection in their own school or community.

Here is what has worked for me: See if a nearby supermarket or pharmacy with a good magazine collection that includes children's magazines, or a bookstore or newsstand will let you do a magazine drive. Explain it's like a food drive where you'll give a small flyer to [img_assist|nid=29|title=Get magazines into the hands, homes, and hearts of children and families in food pantry grocery bags.|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=140|height=147]each shopper on the way into the store and they will deposit the magazine purchase on the way out. You can ask the shoppers to focus on kids magazines for your students, but if they give others, those can always go home to the children's families. I am basing this magazine drive idea on having very successful food drives for over 20 years - always in the same way. It started one day when I went to a food pantry with empty shelves in 1986. I wondered, how could I fill those shelves quickly? So, I stood in front of a supermarket for a weekend and collected 2,000 pounds of food. I've kept them up ever since - once or twice a year. Basically, I ask a supermarket manager if I can do the drive (2 out of 3 say yes). Then I plan to spend the day at [img_assist|nid=28|title=25+ Carts of Groceries in a Single Day! Imagine how many magazines you can collect.|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=224|height=165]the store, or, if friends or colleagues are helping, we take two-hour shifts. The key is a smile and eye-to-eye contact with each shopper on the way in the store. A large number of people will purchase one or more items. I've collected as much as 25 full grocery carts in a single day. Often, shoppers express how much they want to help and how much they appreciate the convenience of the collection effort.

For the flyer handout, I like a 4 per page format (folded from top to bottom and then left to right) for food drives because 500 copies turns into 2,000 flyers. However, for magazines, a "bookmark" shape might make more sense. That's a landscape sheet of paper folded twice from left to right. I like yellow paper because it stands out like a shopping list, but any bright color works fine. Feel free to copy any graphics off our website, such as the logo and the KinderHarvest recycling logo.

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There are two sides to a KinderHarvest magazine collection:
1. finding agencies that need the magazines.
2. the magazine collection itself.

Step 1: Identify the Literacy Need
A good match is collecting magazines for a nearby food pantry or homeless shelter. It's best to know where the magazines will go first, as well as how many children and adults receive services (e.g. the number of families that get a bag of groceries from a food pantry, or beds used at a shelter each week; also, the approximate number of children and adults served, and the general demographics, such as gender counts). This will allow you to set goals for the magazine drive and to target the drive to meet specific needs. If you can identify one or more agencies that will use the magazines, that would be great. If needed, we can help with that.

Step 2: Collect Magazines
Your students could then bring in "gently used," recent issues of magazines - this way, the children and families will receive current magazines to read and enjoy. Your class could also be the HQ for a magazine collection throughout the school. As part of the project, perhaps students could craft a note or artwork to include with each magazine. This could be a one time event or repeated as time allows.

Why Gently Used?
One of the essential tenets of our magazine literacy program is for children and families, who cannot otherwise obtain their own magazines, to enjoy the same experience as others when their subscriptions arrive in the mail with their name on the address label - that feeling we get when we open our own mailboxes, when the only thing that matters is finding the next issue of our favorite magazine.

Step 3: Label the Magazines
The at-risk children and families we serve have few possessions, and [img_assist|nid=26|title=Label a Child|desc=|link=url,http://magazineliteracy.org/?tp=ideas#label|align=left|width=100|height=35]in the places we reach them - in homeless and domestic violence shelters, they usually arrive with no possessions. So affixing a label to their magazine gift instills a sense of ownership, pride, and self-esteem - the label makes it something they can call their own - "my own magazine." The magazine is very important, but it's their name on the label that makes the magazine their property. So that tiny label creates tremendous value. We have label templates you can use on our website.

Step 4: Count and Deliver your Magazines
Collecting magazine puts smiles on the faces of donors and volunteers. The greatest smiles will be on the faces of teachers and other literacy agents and the children and families who receive them. Keep track and report how many magazines you collect and distribute for our national tally.

We can set you up with a blog here to tell your story and to post photes so others can learn from your experience. Or, send us information and photos, which we will post on our web site as an example for others. Be sure to follow your school's policies for photo release.

Here are links to more information about KinderHarvest:
http://magazineliteracy.org/?tp=kinderharvest
http://magazineliteracy.org/blog/?cat=16

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Magazine Literacy Bees are volunteers and teams that organize MagazineLiteracy.org projects in their own communities, so that children and families can learn and love to read. Information about these wonderful projects is shared here so others can learn how to organize similar efforts. Get started today! Check out our "how to" forum and 5 steps to success. Change the world... one magazine at a time!