Written by In 2008, First Book partnered with C&S Wholesale Grocers for the second year in a row. This time it was to bring the power of First Book to the community that C&S calls home – Keene, New Hampshire and the Monadnock Region of Southwest NH. In addition to being the home of C&S headquarters, Keene is a small rural community about an hour northeast of Boston, and just a few minutes from where I was born. To say I was excited to effect change near where I grew up was as an understatement, and with the help of my colleague Nicole Thompson and the hard work of First Book’s Keene State College Campus Advisory Board, we set out over the course of eight months to share the magic of First Book with children in Southwest NH.
‘Food for the Body, Food for the Mind,’ as the initiative is called, has now brought 50,000 new age appropriate books to the area, many of which arrived at organizations and schools just in time for the holidays. Thank you notes from First Book Recipient Groups in Southwest New Hampshire have been pouring in ever since. Here are two that remind me why I wake up every morning excited to go to work:
“I recently provided a 15 year old girl who was slipping in school and had been getting into some fights, with a First Book book. READ MORE »
