While the shape of the school year remains uncertain in our state, Books Are Wings is committed to finding ways to keep kids reading!

We’ve been working remotely as a team this spring and summer to ensure that Rhode Island students, who are heading back to this fall, experience the joy of reading notwithstanding the Covid-19 pandemic. This week we’re announcing a call-to-action to all Rhode Islanders who wish to support us in this effort–by donating new and gently used books; donating funds to purchase new books; and volunteering on a number of upcoming activities.

As a school year full of uncertainty approaches, it’s more important than ever that we continue to find ways to support parents and teachers with reading opportunities for kids. We’ve come up with new and different ways to safely deliver books, whether to virtual summer camps and summer food distribution sites, or through continued virtual programming.

Now we’re looking toward the start of the school year, and we need the community’s help to get more books into the hands of children who need them most.

As you may know, Books Are Wings provided 77,000 books during the 2018-2019 school year. We achieved this by organizing school and early learning book parties, community distribution events and summer programs for K-8 students. When these opportunities dried up this summer, we were forced to pivot to new ways to safely accept books and donations for our activities.

Some of these include accepting limited books donations by appointment only; accepting new book donations via a Books Are Wings Amazon book wish list; creating a Book Fund to accept monetary donations to purchase new books; and quarantining books before sending them out for safe delivery.

In addition to free books, Book Are Wings is continuing to provide free programming through our weekly Virtual Read Aloud series on Facebook Live on Wednesdays at 12:30 pm. Today’s read aloud is Fort Building Time, an elementary level illustrated book by Megan Wagner Lloyd (2017) and read by our Executive Director Jocelynn White. A video of the read aloud will remain “pinned” to the Books Are Wings Facebook page and posted to our YouTube channel for later viewing as well. Each read-aloud session is accompanied by a free online Activity worksheet on our website under the link to Parent Resources.

Please contact Kim Nelson, Director of Community Engagement at kim@booksarewings.org for more info on donating books. Visit our donation page here to make a monetary donation and check out our volunteer opportunities here!

Now more than ever, we’re grateful for the support of our donors, community partners and volunteers!