First Book… or First Video?
October 4th, 2006
Kevin M.
Here at the First Book office in Washington, D.C., we get a bit confused sometimes. You’ve heard all the terms before — Book Relief, National Book Bank, Literacy Site — and now there’s one more for you to remember: “Learning Libraries.” But wait… Learning Libraries don’t come with books? What’s going on here?
Two weeks ago, as part of our Book Relief initiative, we completed a distribution of nearly 1,800 Learning Libraries to groups on the Gulf coast that were affected by the 2005 hurricanes. Each Learning Library consisted of one TV/VCR (donated by Funai) and twenty educational videos (donated by Disney).
Although “books for kids” is the mantra you usually hear around the office, we realized in late 2005 that the devastation wrought by Katrina and Rita warranted not only our assistance, but a change in how we do things in order to meet the unique needs of those rebuilding in the Gulf.
“Of course we’ll provide children’s books,” we thought. But what about the adults, don’t they need books? And so with the help of our publishing partners, we started providing novels and history books alongside Board books and teen fiction.
“Of course we want to get books into children’s homes,” we thought. But what about the schools and libraries that lost their collections, don’t they need books? And so through Book Relief, we have helped to rebuild both home libraries and school libraries.
In other words, First Book started thinking about how we could use our resources to fit the needs of those in the Gulf — even if it didn’t match our traditional model for how to fight illiteracy. So when Disney and Funai approached First Book to donate this amazing educational resource, we knew that we wanted many of these Learning Libraries to benefit the hurricane-affected programs.
Over the course of four days, with the help of some amazing volunteers, we filled up four 52-foot trailers with TV/VCRs and boxes of videos to send down to the Gulf coast! As usual, we owe a special thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard (an amazing First Book partner) — both for hosting the Learning Library distribution from the Coast Guard Yard warehouse in Baltimore, and for providing many wonderful volunteers.
Volunteers pack educational videos into boxes.
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