As a follow-up to our charity picks for 24 Festive Tasks, I thought I'd share a few of the lists and websites I consulted when making my choice, and reproduce the brief descriptions of the organizations presented there, in case anybody here on BookLikes should be interested in following up with one of them.  Most of them have offices in the countries where the majority of BookLikers are from, so it should be easy for anyone interested to take a closer look.  As I said in my earlier post, there are many tremendously devoted organizations with phantastic programs out there; I really had a hard time making up my mind.

Bookfriends International, the charity I eventually chose, is located in the greater Chicago area (1000 N. Rand Road, #206 Wauconda, IL. 60084, phone (1-847) 726-8776; email bookfriends [at] earthlink . net).  I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear more from us.

That said, here are the resources I consulted when making my decision:

1. To begin with, there is the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning / Book Donation Agencies page, which lists the following book charities:

2. Then, there is an International Book Giving Day blog post on a book reviewer's blog called Playing by the book, which presents 150+ literacy and reading charities (both international and domestic): Some of these overlap with the UNESCO list, but the blog post lists many other charities as well.  The blog post also contains links for the UK Charity Commission Register and The Office of the Scottish Charities Register (the link provided there for the IRS charity search page is broken; the new IRS charity search page is here); and it features, inter alia, MbD's and Moonlight's 2018 choices (and my 2017 choice), The Book Bus and Room to Read:

The Book Bus
The Book Bus believes that every child should have the opportunity to discover the hidden treasures that books contain. Our aim is to reveal the value of literacy by instilling a lifelong love of reading in young children. Using the spoken word, artwork, puppet-making and a host of other media, our volunteers bring to life the worlds within storybooks. The Book Bus provides a mobile service and actively promotes literacy to underprivileged communities in Zambia and Ecuador. The legacy of each Book Bus visit is a reading corner and bookshelves stocked with children’s books.

 

Room to Read
Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments, we develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children, and support girls to complete secondary school with the relevant life skills to succeed in school and beyond.

... as well as, for example:

IBBY – The International Board on Books for Young People
The International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) is a non-profit organization which represents an international network of people from all over the world who are committed to bringing books and children together. As well as supporting the general organization you can also donate to specific projects around the world through their Children in Crisis Fund.

 

LitWorld
LitWorld works to cultivate literacy leaders worldwide through transformational literacy experiences that build connection, understanding, resilience and strength. LitWorld joins together with teachers, parents, community members, and children to support the development of sustainable literacy practices across the world. One of their main activities is World Read Aloud Day.

 

GBA Ships
The ships visit each port for several weeks each and open the gangways to hundreds and sometimes thousands of visitors each day. On average, over one million visitors have been welcomed on board every year! The floating book fairs offer over 7,000 titles, providing many visitors their first-ever opportunity to purchase a wide range of quality literature.

 

SHINE
Shine is a literacy charity that works in Zambia. They run a literacy school in a shanty town in Lusaka which has around 150 children all learning how to read and write. Every child receives a daily meal at the school and pays no fees whatsoever.

 

Friends of African Village Libraries
FAVL’s goal is to assist the rural poor of Africa with the creation of village libraries. FAVL refurbishes community-donated buildings, transforming them into a space to read and study. Libraries are stocked with books by local authors and in local languages to the greatest extent possible. In addition, FAVL sponsors librarian training and provides for librarian salaries, thereby empowering locals with skilled employment.

 

Wings of the Dawn
Our Vision is to establish functional literate communities in Africa to bridge the gap between poverty and prosperity. Our Mission is to help build economically stable and productive societies in African communities by ensuring access to self-sustaining educational centers for its citizens.

3. And finally, there is of course Google, which will take you directly, inter alia, to the websites of these two programs:

World Literacy Foundation

"We strive to ensure that every young individual regardless of geographic location has the opportunity to acquire literacy and reading skills to reach their full potential, succeed at school and beyond. We provide free access to quality education materials and innovate solutions that target wide-scale illiteracy. We envision a world in which every one of us can read and write, in which there is free access to education for all."

 

Aid for Africa / Girls Education Project

"Aid for Africa is committed to empowering girls through education. When a girl in Africa gets the chance to go to school and stay in school, the cycle of poverty is broken and things change."

... or rather, giving back time -- giving back to all of you for the enthusiasm and creativity you brought to the 2018 version of 24 Festive Tasks!

As MbD said, there are many deserving charities with many deserving individual projects out there, and a heartening number of them are book-related.  My choice this year, again, was a charity that not only fosters reading and education but, more specifically, girls' education:

I chose Bookfriends International, NFP, a U.S.-based, registered (501(c)3 tax status), volunteer-run nonprofit committed to helping educate children in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and Malawi by providing secondary schools (equivalent to American grades 5 to 12) and teachers in these African countries with books, supporting educational materials and services donated by schools, libraries, used book stores, book clubs, educators, and private individuals.  They work on a grassroots level, in direct contact with school administrators and village leaders in their African partner areas.

From their website:

"To understand what Bookfriends International is about is to understand our belief that education can generate the real, long-term solutions for many of our world’s problems. Strong democracies, vibrant economies, healthy societies and responsible birth control can only progress on the foundation of an educated population.  We center our efforts around supporting the African education system.

 

Bookfriends International was founded on the belief that every child deserves a chance to learn and to develop his or her individual abilities. [...]

Our founders envisioned that the surplus and used books in America could be put to efficient use to bolster educational opportunities in Africa. After years of working with many school teachers and administrators in Africa, we know even more fully that good books, properly placed, create individual growth and bring personal victories of dynamic proportions.

 

We know that when hearts and minds become hopeful, helpful and forward-looking, communities and whole societies benefit. Education is basic to tackling poverty, corruption and social injustice and to keep those problems from passing to the next generation.

 

An important element of our philosophy is to provide the right books to a school at the right time. We work closely with African schools to satisfy their individual needs."

 

"Bookfriends provides children and their educators and librarians in Africa hope for the future. Education is the key for African youth to become self-sustaining and contributing citizens of a better world.  Each book we donate is very much like casting pebbles into a still pond: the ripples created by each book received, creates the awakening of a young mind!

 

The schools’ needs are pre-determined prior to gathering books for a shipment through direct contact with our established and growing network of school and village leaders in Africa. [...]

 

Each school receives a well-chosen library of approximately 1,000 books.  To date, more than 100,000 students have found a productive direction for their lives, thanks to volunteers and donors of Bookfriends."

A donation of USD 100 will provide for 200 books -- or one fifth of the library provided to one particular school.

The types of books being shipped include scholastic material for all major subjects, including STEM, English, world history and geography, economics / business, health, music, and fine arts; as well as library resources and reference material (dictionaries / encyclopedias, thesauruses, and copies of National Geographic), and also fiction books.  A detailed list can be found here.

In addition, Bookfriends International has initiated a Girls' Project to assist African girls to stay in school longer.  They explain:

"In many cultures around the world, including Africa, girls are often not valued very highly.  It is just the way it is, and has been for centuries.

 

How can this change?

 

There ARE solutions, and Bookfriends is working on an initiative to encourage the girls to remain in their classrooms consistently simply by having monthly hygiene supplies. By staying in school, they are able to continue receiving an education.  Education can change their lives dramatically.

 

The educated female students, in turn, are more valued by their families and communities.  As the young women display their capabilities, they are appreciated more than ever by their peers as well.  Additionally, the great increase in their self-esteem as educated young ladies gives the girls aspiration and visions for a healthy and productive future.

 

If a girl can remain in school all month, she won’t fall behind in her classes. If she stays home for a week per month, she may not be allowed by her family to return. She will have less risk of becoming a victim of sex trafficking if she can remain in school. [...]

 

Each container of books that we ship serves 10 schools, in which there are approximately 4,000 female students."

The monthly hygiene kits provided by Bookfriends and its volunteer contributors contain the basic items that women in North America and Europe have come to take for granted, but which are still in woefully short supply in parts of Africa and elsewhere in the southern hemisphere, such as pads and clean underwear; as well as information brochures.  Obviously, menstrual hygiene is only one of the hurdles that girls in Africa have to overcome on their path to education, but it's one of the most jaw-droppingly basic ones, and I love seeing a charity that understands and addresses the fact that education -- especially women's education -- is not an issue separate and apart, but can only be truly successful if it is seen in conjunction with the students' lives outside school (or at least those aspects of their lives that have the very real power of negatively impacting their learning and school attendance).

(All images in this post from the Bookfriends International website)

ETA: I've had not one but two very nice, personal emails from one of the co-founders of the project thanking us for our donation and expressing appreciation for the BookLikes community.  From her emails I take it that our donation will go towards funding books, but it will also make a significant contribution to the girls' project.  W00t!

In the spirit of this game, Murder by Death and I agreed that we wanted to support charities working internationally, in countries where reading is still a challenge to many.  We looked at charities active in various parts of the world, working in a number of different ways and with different focuses, and eventually chose two that cover a fairly wide array of countries in Africa and Asia, with different approaches, but with the common goal of making books and the ability to read available to everybody, from childhood on.

These are the two we've decided to support on the basis of this game:

Book Aid International

(https://www.bookaid.org/)

From their website:

"Our mission, vision and values

We believe that books have the power to change lives. This belief underpins our vision, mission and the values which guide everything we do.

 

Our vision and mission

Our vision is a world where everyone has access to books that will enrich, improve and change their lives.

Our mission is to provide books, resources and training to support an environment in which reading for pleasure, study and lifelong learning can flourish.

 

Our values

Our values inform and guide our work. We are committed to:

Equality of opportunity. Everyone should have the opportunity to read, whatever their circumstances. We support people from all walks of life in their efforts to access the books they need to achieve their goals.

Quality. No-one should have to make do with old, out-of-date books which do not meet their needs. The quality of the books we send is the hallmark of our work.

Investment in the future. Capacity building creates long-term-impact. We help increase the ability of local libraries to support their communities by training librarians and teacher librarians in working with children and other key skills.

Collaboration. Working in partnership ensures that our work is effective, responsive and meets communities’ real needs. We work closely with national library services, NGOs, community library networks, local government and individual institutions.

 

What we do

We provide books so that people can change their own lives through reading.

 

The need for our work

Across Africa, millions of people are unable to fulfil their potential because of a basic lack of books and reading resources.

Literacy and access to information have been shown to reduce poverty, providing opportunities for work, increasing household income, even improving the health of children. A child born to a mother who can read is 50% more likely to survive past the age of five.

We understand the pleasure and opportunities that reading can bring and we believe everyone should have the opportunity to read. Through reading, people can change their own lives for the better and shape their own futures.

 

What we do

In places where books are scarce libraries are often the best places for people to discover the joy of reading. By supporting libraries we can provide access to books for millions of people each year.

We supply brand new books, donated by publishers, to public, community and school libraries across Africa. By partnering with national library services, government departments and NGOs we are able to send up to one million brand new, carefully selected books to Africa each year.

With training and skills development librarians can transform their libraries into the heart of their communities. We provide training to develop the skills of librarians for years to come.

 

Where we work

At present, we are proud to support readers in 14 countries.

CAMEROON
ERITREA
ETHIOPIA
KENYA
MALAWI
OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
SIERRA LEONE
SOMALIA
SOUTH SUDAN
TANZANIA
UGANDA
ZAMBIA
ZIMBABWE"

And:

Room to Read

(https://www.roomtoread.org/)

 From their website:

"We Believe that World Change Starts with Educated Children.

We envision a world in which all children can pursue a quality education that enables them to reach their full potential and contribute to their communities and the world.

Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in low-income countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments, we develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children, and support girls to complete secondary school with the relevant life skills to succeed in school and beyond. 

 

When a Child Reads, She Can Write Her Future

Being able to read and write is essential. Written words are gateways to knowledge and opportunity that are only accessible to those with the ability to decipher them. Despite the known benefits of literacy, 175 million young people in low- and lower middle-income countries are unable to read a single sentence. That’s one out of every four children.

Without a strong foundation of literacy skills, children are more likely to struggle throughout their education, live in poverty and see their potential hampered. In the areas where we work, numerous barriers prevent students from developing the literacy skills they need to thrive. These include a lack of educational resources, minimal exposure to age-appropriate books, insufficiently trained teachers and overstretched infrastructure. We evaluate the extent of these main barriers and work in partnership with local governments to assist schools to address the specific challenges they are facing and ensure students have what they need to develop strong literacy skills and a habit of reading.

 

When Girls Stay in School, Life Improves...for Everyone

Whether or not a girl stays in school has an astounding effect on not only her quality of life, but on her future family’s as well. For a girl in one the most underserved parts of the world, staying in school longer means she is more likely to build a smaller and healthier family, lower her probability of contracting HIV, and earn a higher wage. She is also more likely to marry later and educate her own children — ending the cycle of illiteracy in one generation.

Yet, girls lag behind boys in their completion of secondary school. In the last decade, the world has made significant gains in primary school enrollment but girls in low income countries still drop out at an alarming rate. Out of the 124 million children and young adolescents who are out of school, 52 percent are girls. Girls face serious barriers such as cultural bias and lack of safety. And these challenges can compound as girls transition into secondary school; they include increased school costs, the need to contribute to family income, and pressures to marry and begin a family. Thus, our program includes four core components — life skills, mentors, material support, and community engagement, which we implement based on local conditions, individual need and grade level.

 

Negotiating a Better Future Through Life Skills

Girls need life skills. Thinking critically, empathizing and relying on themselves help them meet day-to-day challenges and make informed decisions. When girls learn these skills and how to use them daily, they become better equipped to handle the challenges they may face, from gender bias to finding time to study. We help girls to discover their own strength, advocate for themselves, and create a new and different path from the one that might be forced upon them. Our program enables girls to learn and practice life skills through classes, workshops and extracurricular activities.

 

Sustaining and Scaling Girls' Education Programs

With your support we can scale faster and transform communities across the globe. Together, we have the potential to reach 15 million children by 2020. We invest in girls’ education for long-term, systemic change. That means sustaining our programs for years, if not decades, and scaling them to a country’s need. To these ends, we focus on girls’ transitions into and through secondary school — that’s where the biggest and most permanent gaps in gender equality in education take place. We also collaborate with government officials at the local, regional and national levels to promote girl-friendly learning environments. These partnerships ensure that our program is complementary of national efforts, sustainable and nationally scalable.

 

Impact & Reach

BANGLADESH
CAMBODIA
INDIA
LAOS
NEPAL
SOUTH AFRICA
SRI LANKA
TANZANIA
VIETNAM
ZAMBIA"

 

Merken

Merken