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Who, What, When, Where, Why magazines for literacy?
At MagazineLiteracy.org, we love to celebrate the amazing work being done at the literacy agencies that help us to get the magazines you love into the hands, hearts, and homes of children and families who want to learn and love to read them. Books are vital for reading and literacy, but here’s a story that explains why new and recycled magazines are so special. This compelling feedback from the Sojourner House transitional housing program in Roxbury, Massachusetts is brought to us by our Boston literacy champion, Katie Simmons:
Katie,
Thank you so much for the service you provide to the children and their parents here at Sojourner House. The families love receiving magazines from you each month. Many of the school-aged children are overwhelmed by books because of their length, as well as the lack of pictures. The magazines that you bring each month provide a way for the children, who otherwise would not read, to be engaged in reading, which is so crucial in their ability to do well in school. They love having colored pictures to go along with what they’re reading. One of the boys at the shelter loves to draw characters from some of the comic books you bring, and he writes stories to go along with his drawings. I am thrilled that his love of reading comics has given him the desire to use his imagination and write his own stories.
The younger children love the magazines as well. The magazines you bring to the shelter, such as High Five, contain short stories that the child and an adult can read together, which encourages parent-child bonding and is so important for a young child’s growth. One of the girls at the shelter loves to do the activities, such as “Hidden Pictures.” She brings a magazine with her when she goes out, which gives her something engaging to do in the car. I’m confident that it’s helping her build skills that will help her once she begins school.
Not only are the magazines you bring us each month beneficial to the children, but the consumer magazines give the parents something to do, which they really appreciate. One of the parents showed me an article she read about healthy eating that she wanted to share with her teenage daughter. The consumer and teen magazines have many great articles that are very relevant to the lives of the guests who live at the shelter.
Once again, thank you for your encouragement of literacy at the shelter. I hope you will continue to bring magazines to various places that are in need of magazines, including our shelter.
Brenda German
Child Advocate
Sojourner House
Celebrating Children’s Illustrator Aja Wells
We are celebrating Aja Wells – a fabulously talented children’s illustrator who is helping to bring MagazineLiteracy.org to life. Aja’s work is so fresh and colorful. We are very excited about this collaboration and the wonderful possibilities. Stay tuned.
The magazine lady is here
I deliver magazines to an inner city bakery training program. When I walk into the cafe with a large bundle of Gourmet, Cooking Light, Saveur, Food & Wine or Eating Well they all exclaim from behind the counter: “Look, the magazine lady is here!” Pure music to my magazine ears. Who knows, one day through the combination of their training and practical work experience, coupled with the engaging articles, they could land their own cooking show! In the meantime, I will continue to deliver magazines filled with mouth watering photos of everything from Lobster Stew to Wild Maine Blueberry Crisp. They are hooked on reading the recipes and articles in the magazines. So, fellow foodies please continue with your generous contributions of food magazines.
Captions that have captured
Earlier this year, on one of my biweekly deliveries to a family shelter in Boston, I was able to speak with a young mother who had returned from taking her 4-month-old son for a walk on a beautiful day. When she saw the large bundle of magazines I had, she smiled and said, “you are the magazine lady!” I said yes and asked if she would like some. She was thrilled and she said she was moving out of the shelter very soon to her own apartment with her new son, so she would love the Parenting magazines, and decorating and home magazines. One might never think when donating a magazine to a homeless shelter that they would be welcomed there, but, by taking time to speak, with this young mom, I was able to connect her with magazines that were of interest.
I always want the magazine to be a source of comfort and knowledge to the new readers, so continually ask for feedback from the families and staff at the shelters. When I handed a woman a recent issue of Parenting magazine, she noted the caption of an article on the cover: How to raise a polite child, and that caught her eye. She said that is so important and thanked me again for the magazines.
I could tell from speaking to her that she and her son where headed for new beginnings, and knowing how happy she was to receive the magazines once again solidified the importance of my efforts.
Giving never gets old
I deliver women’s and children’s magazines to a shelter a few miles from my home that is home to over 60 families. Today I had the privilege of meeting a young mother and her 4-year-old daughter, who was playing hopscotch. I introduced myself and asked if her daughter would like a magazine. She was very appreciative and said her daughter would love it. The little girl was so pleased to show me how she could write her name on the label on the cover. I drove away with a smile seeing the smile on her face. My mission is to make sure every child in every shelter has that chance.
Elegant ways to recycle magazines to new readers
Is it possible that just reading the book In Pursuit of Elegance would fill our literacy tool chest with elegant solutions? Perhaps just having finished the Power of Intention audio book helped to move things along.
In the last two days I have encountered two beautifully elegant magazine recycling ideas that help to resolve some sticky challenges associated with the logistics of moving magazines around to new readers.
bluebin.org is a new web service that facilitates the re-use of goods within a community – much like freecycle.org – which is also a great idea. bluebin is blessed with a very friendly Web 2.0 design. When I arrived at the site, there were already some magazines listed for re-use. We’ve added some of our own and will encourage others to do so. This especially helps us address situations where generous consumers want to donate their magazines for literacy from locations where we do not yet have a volunteer team in place to manage the flow to community literacy programs.
Today, I spoke to a wonderful magazine distributor in Wisconsin who wants to get surplus, expired copies of magazines from the newsstand to new readers. This person has a ready supply of magazines that children and adults would love to read – especially our neighbors who find themselves in homeless or domestic violence shelters, or children in after-school or other mentoring programs. One of our most difficult challenges for our literacy marketplace is moving magazines around from literacy champions to literacy agents. The incredibly elegant beauty of this opportunity is that the Wisconsin distributor travels the State, picking up the surplus magazines, and readily wants to help deliver them to our volunteer teams or community literacy programs. The solution is win-win, where we bring literacy needs to the table that the distributor enjoys filling and children and families can enjoy magazines that would have otherwise been destroyed.
We’ve dreamed of tapping this newsstand link in the magazine supply chain since our inception and have had some success already. Developing this model further will teach lessons that will enable us to quickly inspire others to replicate the program. We are boosted by a convergence with technology that now allows distributors to scan returned magazines for audit purposes, rather than tearing their covers or otherwise returning them for destruction.
No silver lining in demise of Reading Rainbow
Recent news about the financial demise of Reading Rainbow, one of PBS’s most popular and important literacy programs for children for over 25 years is a dark cloud with no silver lining. However, there are important lessons about the need for literacy projects to not only invite and inspire children and families to want to enjoy reading, but also to focus on teaching young people how to read. We are saddened by the loss of this great program, and will no less celebrate the joy of reading, but will redouble our efforts to know and to apply lessons about reading fundamentals to our magazine literacy work.
The Other America is still out there and needs our undivided attention
I am, for the first time in my life, in South Dakota, traveling by car from the East Coast to the West Coast. I borrowed a book on tape for the trip: “The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America.” I’ve just come through Indiana, where RFK entered, and won – against so many odds – his first primary. The book details RFK’s presidential campaign journey through to his most significant primary wins, which happened on the same night in California and South Dakota.
I was too young to know about all this and so much more that was happening at the time. What is most striking about the story is not the politics, but the purpose of RFK’s campaign – spotlighting at every chance – the plight of poor children and families in America. A decade later, my own coming of age was fed by Michael Harrington’s, “The Other America,” Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools,” and Janet Fitchen’s “Poverty in Rural America.”
However, somewhere along the way, I feel as though my attention shifted away from the reality that there are still millions of children and families in American who are hungry – for food; for shelter; for protection; for literacy; for our steady and compassionate attention.
There have been too many distractions over too long a span to place a finger on where and when the blinders went on – welfare reform, 9/11, the boom and bust economy; bombardment by email, cell phones, Blackberries, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Where did it begin and where will it end?
There are stories in the book about two days that RFK spent in South Dakota – most significantly at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and other accounts about meeting children in the Mississippi delta. Children were dying from poverty in both places, and countless others – one child died the day he was at Pine Ridge. Today, racing down I-90, forty years after RFK’s visit to Pine Ridge, I kept working through my mind, over and over, whether we could possibly still have that kind of poverty here and other places in America. Having organized hunger relief initiatives, and now literacy projects for over twenty years, I am hardly naive, but have admittedly lost my way.
The truth was revealed by a few thumb clicks on my Blackberry. I learned that places in America that breed desperation and despair are not without serious strife and controversy – that would be too much to expect. I should have known, but also learned today that the children and families who live in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation still face desperate poverty and an overwhelming array of afflictions.
So, what can we do? We can and will redouble our efforts to shine a bright spotlight on literacy needs in communities like this and to inspire champions like you to give undivided, compassionate attention to millions of children and families hungry to enjoy reading. If the enormity of the challenge gives us pause, we will persevere together – we will not be guided or dissuaded by the politics of the past or present, but by a purpose for the future – we will make a difference one child, one family, one magazine at a time. Thank you for your support.
Thank you for your passion to serve.
First, I can not thank our volunteers and donors enough for their interest and participation in supporting the mission and goals of MagazineLiteracy.org, the first and only global, magazine industry-wide literacy campaign for children and families.
We have accomplished so much thanks to the commitment and self-initiative of hundreds of individuals. Still, we have so much to do, with your help, to meet our full promise to children and families who want to learn and love to read magazines.
We have learned many lessons, doing many things well, and some things not so well. One area that needs improvement is our communication and follow-up with the volunteers and supporters who are so generous in offering their time, ideas, dollars, magazines, and passion.
Due to many intense economic and social forces, we face a perfect storm of challenge, need, opportunity, and responsibility. As an all volunteer organization with a global vision, the interest in our work and the demands placed on our organization have exceeded our capacity serve them. We risk neglecting a timely opportunity to deploy willing volunteers and to tap generous benefactors to meet local literacy needs, while addressing global environmental challenges.
We are grateful for the patience of our stakeholders while we rethink and re-engineer MagazineLiteracy.org through these “growing pains.” We are stronger and even more determined to succeed and to better prepare and deploy our volunteers and other resources in community service across the U.S., and around the world. This is both an opportunity and a responsibility for MagazineLiteracy.org.
We still have a journey ahead of us to strengthen our ability to provide steady, sustainable support to our volunteers and donors. As we develop this capability, we want to continue to organize effective, successful community based magazine literacy projects. We can provide access to collaboration and social networking tools and information to help community literacy projects to grow and prosper, but we need our supporters to be the seeds of this vast endeavor. We need to rely on the dedication and the self-initiative of our volunteers and donors to self-educate, and to self-organize, and to lead and promote magazine literacy projects that identify and meet the needs of children and families in their own communities. From that will emerge a massive marketplace of great ideas shared between and among local MagPower Teams, using the tools and communications channels available at MagazineLiteracy.org.
Our first task is to organize individual volunteers into community teams, so they can work together to meet local needs. We will utilize BigTent, an online team collaboration tool, and other methods, to organize each of our community volunteer MagTeams and to serve as a repository for information and to foster communication across local groups.
Many supporters have already organized very important magazine literacy projects in their own communities. We want to hear about and celebrate these projects, as models for others to replicate. Please be sure to contact us with the details so we can post your stories in our Literacy Bee blog.
About ten years ago, I walked from Washington DC to Boston – twenty miles a day, for thirty days. I could not imagine how I would begin, yet alone complete such a walk of one million footsteps. How did I do it? How did I get to my destination over such a vast distance of so many horizons? One step at a time. Let these be the first steps in your so important and meaningful journey to find and to feed children and families hungry to read. Working and walking together, we are changing the world, one magazine, one child, one family at a time. Thank you again for your passion to serve.
Massachusetts feedback
Take a look at this feedback received from children in a Massachusetts domestic violence center. Click Here
Getting back to reading basics to rebuild a prosperous society
We have all heard “give a person a fish and you feed them for a day… teach them to fish and you feed them for life.” I say, “first you need to feed a person, so they have the strength and the dignity to learn how to fish… next, you need to teach them to read.”
Although I’ve been deeply involved in community and public policy and public service for many decades, I don’t usually comment on education or literacy policy. There are certainly more than enough experts and pundits, and we strive to be a literacy “big tent” – remaining non-partisan in our public service.
Our mission at MagazineLiteracy.org is to leverage our talent and resources to facilitate the flow of reading materials from their varied and generous sources to new readers, not to reinvent the literacy wheels that are already well in motion or to overlap or to presume the needs of expert literacy agents.
However, the intensity of the current economic calamity and the impending dam burst of government and public financing and leadership necessary to reverse it and restore any semblance of balance drives me to underscore the obvious importance of getting back to and sticking with the basics, such as teaching children to read, and getting reading materials into homes with barren bookshelves.
The task will be that much more challenging, but no less important, as public service agents struggle to meet even more critical needs, like food for hungry children, families, and elderly neighbors. As consumers limit spending to necessities, and commerce slows, leading to more layoffs, the already frayed safety net of emergency food, shelter, and health care will be stretched to the breaking point.
If literacy and reading skills are the most basic ingredient for success and productivity in every corner of society, then it’s too easy, but terribly painful now to ask why so many children and adults in the U.S. and around the world cannot read well enough. Even with so much riding on the wave of a digital economy, the fastest growing e-commerce opportunities are around text messaging. No matter how many pages the internet grows to, no matter how many books Google digitizes, no matter how many magazines are available on the Kindle, not one can be read by a child or an adult unable to read.
Join our mission to feed children and families hungry to read and succeed.
Leveraging technology is game changing for magazine literacy
We are just getting started in Second Life and the learning curve is definitely a challenge. We factor that in to our exploration of new technologies, but we also look to engage volunteers who have particular interests and skills – to flatten the curve. Managing this brings its own challenges, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
Our focus on innovation and looking for ways to leverage new social networking and web technology tools helps to increase awareness and engagement of stakeholders and to drive down costs. The opportunity to find hidden value in untapped veins drives our literacy progress forward. If the spaghetti sticks on the wall, we go deeper… if it slides off, we clean up the mess and cook another pot.
In this free social marketplace, we can find and engage untapped volunteer resources – individuals and businesses who have not yet been called on or motivated to act, without necessarily diverting them away from other important social priorities or our other work – untapped not because they are uninterested, but for lack of common interest at the finest level of detail.
We are often asked what relevance this magazine or that magazine will have in meeting child and family literacy needs. Some, like Highlights, or Ranger Rick, or Scientific American are obvious resources. But, how could a bowling magazine be of value or the trade magazine of the “American Pot Stickers Association?” It might just be that bowling magazine or that trade journal that can uniquely inspire the bond around a common interest between a mentor and a child learning to read.
So the risk of failure, and the possibility of diminishing returns aside, the chance to exercise any amount of previously untapped value trumps ignoring the possibilities.
Tremendous forces rock our world of magazine literacy
It’s timely to reflect on the tremendous forces and upheavals in the economic, political, and community landscapes that are shaping the ecosystem for our magazine literacy mission. Financial markets are down – then up – then down again. Government, education, human, and community services face enormous funding gaps that demand doing more with less. Within this context, the value of our new and recycled magazines increases significantly for teachers and other community literacy agents helping children and families who want to learn and love to read. Getting reading materials into homes becomes even more imperative as the fabric of safety net wears thin. On the other hand, citizen engagement and activism are way up, thanks to a sweeping non-partisan, national call to public service that will amplify in coming months. Our challenge is to improve our capabilities and collaboration to better inventory and spotlight literacy needs, while channeling and focusing the generous outpouring of compassion and support to meet those needs. Help us to find and feed those hungry to read. Join us to change the world – one magazine – one new reader at a time.