One of the main reasons why we are addressing this need in our community is because we want the children and the adults in our community to love reading and become successful readers. We believe we have identified some of the main reasons why our children and the adults are not reading or simply do not have a desire to read. As stated earlier we want our children to have books that have characters and stories that they can relate to, we want to make reading fun and engaging and we want our families to have books and healthy snacks in their hands. We believe that our Read to Succeed program can help to achieve these reading goals that we have for our community. Even though initially our focus was on just having children with books, we also believe that we have to provide parents with books as well because, one of the most crucial components and sometimes the most overlooked component as to why children are not reading is because they are not seeing the adults around them reading.
ABC Read-Mobile
Help us bring books, storytime, healthy snacks and fun to your neighborhood!
Leader
Robin Brown
Location
Ashbury and East 105th St. Cleveland, OH 44106
About the project
Did you know that 66% of Cleveland residents are functionally illiterate. Functionally illiterate is when a person can’t read past a fourth grade level. So when it comes to reading restaurant menus, schedules or even job applications it becomes a struggle for our community members. What’s even a more startling statistic is that 50% of African-American youth in fourth grade can not read above a fourth grade level. Unfortunately, as we know when a child can't read past the fourth grade that is a precursor to being impoverished, increased drop out rates and being more susceptible to committing crimes which can ultimately lead to incarceration.
Even though these unfortunate statistics exist they don’t have to and this is why our our organization ABC READ, INC has decided to be the change we want to see. We would like to continue what we started in 2014 which is to have our Read To Succeed summer reading program at the Gateway 105 Farmer’s Market.
We understood not only by data but also by our experiences and observations that our young people were not interested in reading a book because of a number of reasons but, there were 3 reasons that continuously were given. When I would ask young people why they were not interested in reading they would answer with, reading is boring, there aren’t books that have characters or topics that we can relate to and we don’t have any books at home.
So, of course we listened to our young people by providing a space where they can come and enjoy interactive read aloud, have fun and engaging projects that reinforce the story being read to them, provide our young people and their families with healthy snacks and finally they get to take a brand new or gently used book with them so they could begin to build their own home libraries. Another very important component to having our summer reading program at the farmer’s market is so our families in particular our youth can learn about entrepreneurship, self-sufficiency, and community building in their own backyards.
The Steps
Promote our fun summer reading program to the neighborhood, schools, businesses by word of mouth, email, and social media
Purchase supplies, books, arts and crafts and snacks
Purchase and retrofit an energy efficient box truck/van
Add a megaphone and ABC reads branding to the exterior
Our intended start date is September 1st, 2018!
Why we‘re doing it