Ooops, I meant to post this yesterday but found the wi-fi site I frequent on the mountain closed “early” and therefore, no posting Saturday afternoon.
Week two in the new office finds RIF settling in and working full steam ahead on upcoming activities: “See What’s Brewing” on the Hill this week and the week of May 24 our spring Board meeting, Gala, visits by our national Volunteers of the Year and both our Literature Advisory Board and Multicultural Advisory Committee. Is this best called “piling it on” ourselves? It will be fun!
COTY: Looking in the rear view mirror, last week was kicked off by a delightful train trip to Stamford, Connecticut where RIF Board member Juanita James of Pitney Bowes was honored by the City of Stamford and the Jewish War Veterans Fred Robbins post 142 as the 65th Stamford Citizen of the Year (COTY). A room at the Italian Center the native Stamford citizens told me is regularly limited to 350-400 guests was packed with 550 individuals present to honor Juanita; quite a tribute, eh? And these folks know how to run a tribute program….an hour of great visiting in advance, dinner, scholarship presentations, and a fun Larry King Live production featuring Juanita followed by a formal presentation of her through remarks of her husband and son, Juanita’s acceptance and voila, it was only 9:15 p.m….plenty of time for more visiting by those who wished to do so! Without question the highlight of the evening was Juanita’s son Dudley N. Williams III presenting his mother – no dry eyes in the room and the most genuine mother/son love you could hope to find in a presentation. Congratulations, Juanita and family, we are so proud to work alongside you!
Pictures below: (1) Squint and you will see it is truly Larry King Live with Juanita as the guest! (2) Dudley III presents his mom. (3) Juanita accepts the award.
DCI: A few years ago as a 40th RIF anniversary gift to the children of DC, RIF national took on the task of directly coordinating the RIF Books for Ownership program within the DC Public Schools; we call it the DC Initiative or DCI. Working in cooperation with a designated lead at each school, RIF closes its office doors three days a year to spend time “walking the walk” in more than 40 schools. It is a time of learning for us and for renewing our dedication to RIF’s mission. This year we have used as the theme for the three distributions the particular culturally designated celebration in the month of the distribution…last week’s distribution was in honor of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. DC’s Martin Luther King Jr. elementary school has been paired this year for each distribution with students at Tyson William Elementary School in Anchorage, Alaska for a Skype experience each distribution; read more about the Dragon dance and these great students!
BookSpring of Austin: I learned through Twitter this week Supt. Carstarphen of Austin visited a RIF site at Barrington Elementary overseen by BookSpring in recent days. She found upon entering the library that it was camping time! What a great way to lead into summer reading – reminding our students in fun ways how important it is for them to continue their reading, expand their reading horizons!
HALF THE SKY: Finally, early in the week I completed this book by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn; it is a tough book to read…tough emotionally, tough intellectually to genuinely absorb “yes, this is all really happening to women and girls around the world.” I’ll write more later, but you need to put HALF THE SKY: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide on your reading list, the “must” read side of the list!
Wishing you all best wishes as you start the new week, Happy Reading!
Carol
1. It was a great week for the RIF DC Initiative with more and more photos now appearing in the office of happy faces holding new, free books and totem poles of renown! Congratulations to the DCI Committee at RIF and all the staff for the hours spent carrying out RIF’s mission in the most direct way with children. And thank you to the many outside RIF who volunteered, contributed and reported!
2. A shout out to our national partners Kappa Kappa Gamma for your support of the DCI day through volunteers; and a big thank you to RIF Board member Carolyn Simpson who serves as the Kappa National Philanthropy Chair for gathering a group of KKG Alumnae this week to discuss with RIF staff how KKG can be even more involved!
3. As November’s days continue to roll by us, National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Monthalso continues to be on RIF’s “radar” daily. The activities associated with DCI this week were as noted in a previous posting related to this special month of study and reflection. I have encouraged through Twitter and other avenues and now ask you, the Rasco from RIF readers, to be sure and start visiting regularly if you do not already do so, Debbie Reese’s blog American Indians in Children’s Literature…a lot of food for thought there. Next week’s WEDNESDAY WINDOW will be posing for all of us some questions about Thanksgiving; in brief, have we really studied the American Indian perspective as we should for this holiday?
4. The Miami Book Fair International is into the weekend street fair; RIF is there and if YOU are there, too, then be sure to look for RIF in the Children’s Alley where activities are awaiting children and families. Lots of fun to be shared! For those of us not there, we can take a look at RIF’s Reading Garden to share some of the same “flavor” and activities!
5. I have BACK HOME by Julia Keller sitting here to start reading next…and I’ve already sneaked a peak at 15 pages; can’t wait to finish this posting as the next pages are calling me!
5. And a good book I read to close out the week? Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls. When I read, no when I rapidly absorbed Walls’ The Glass Castle, her story of being raised in poverty by parents who confounded me as a children’s and family policymaker/advocate, I had such a strong desire to further probe the women in Jeannette’s life, particularly her mother and her grandmother. Half Broke Horses is the “true life novel” Walls has gifted us telling the story of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Walls speaks in her grandmother’s voice and helps those of us who asked - upon finishing The Glass Castle – the perplexing question in one way or another as stated by Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times Book Review: How did such untamed characters come to exist in America, in the not-so-distant 1960’s and ’70’s?
Lily’s story is not that different from the lives many of my generation’s grandparents lived, and I know in addition to more deeply understanding Jeannette’s mother (Lily’s daughter) through this story, I also learned more about the world from which my own wonderful and strong grandmother came, one about which she spoke often. Hardships seen as adventures, teachers of 15 years of age in one-room classrooms, young children of 11 becoming the ranch manager so to speak hiring and managing farm hands as Lily’s own mother working “very hard at being a lady” and not capable of helping her husband with hard labor tasks. Lily’s formal education through the achievement of eventually obtaining her official teaching credentials came in fits and starts, but her life education was a result of all her years of living.
…and we scrimped and saved, pinching every penny till old Abe Lincoln yelped.
We’d always been frugal…we never threw away anything. We saved bits of wood in case we needed shims. When our old shirts finally frayed to pieces, we cut off the buttons and put them in the button box; the shirts we either used as rags or gave them to a seamstress who turned them into patchwork quilts.
But now I came up with additional ways to save money. We made the children chairs out of orange crates. Rosemary
drew on used paper bags-both sides-and painted on old boards. We drank from coffee cans with wire tied around them for handles. Whenever possible, I drove behind trucks so their slipstream pulled me along and I saved on gas.
Happy reading,
Carol
WEEK’S END closes the work week with some thoughts, comments, feelings about some book and/or event recently experienced. If a book, it may be a children’s book or an adult book or both. If an event, it may be literacy-related or not. But it comes at week’s end.
Margaret McNamara Pastor is the daughter of RIF Founder Margaret McNamara and a current member of RIF’s Board of Directors. Today on RIF’s 43rd birthday she shares memories of her mother and RIF.
My mom, Margaret McNamara, loved to read to me, my brother and my sister, and everyone else. By reading to us, my mom transformed us into voracious readers. She worked in the poorer communities in Washington tutoring young people, and she began to notice they were bored and had no motivation to read on their own.
One morning, a simple idea leaped into her brain, and RIF is the child of that idea. If children were going to have fun in the world and become contributing members of society, they needed to enjoy a lifetime of reading. These books should relate to their daily lives, and most importantly, the children needed to have their own books. She believed that if you put books in the hands and the homes of children, this would lead to a life-long love of reading and contribute to a fulfilling life.
Mother had a great love of people, particularly children. She was full of life and energy and felt anything was possible. At base, she believed people were good at heart, and she felt that misfortune and deprivation could be altered. On top of all this, she was persistent to the point of being relentless, particularly on behalf a good cause. RIF is here today because of her determination, and it has grown over 43 years, recruiting thousands of volunteers and millions of RIF kids, because its staff has demonstrated the same striving to improve young people’s lives as she did.
At the beginning, there were few children’s books in paperback. Few books had stories of children of different ethnicities and cultures; few books told the narrative of different families; and there were few publishers or distributors who believed that a free book could make a whole lot of difference in motivating children to read. It was a long slog in the early years. Doors were not easily opened, and a new way of approaching reading motivation was not immediately embraced. But Mother had many crusaders at her side that gave their energy and time to the creation of RIF: Kay Lumley, Barbara Atkinson, Mary Schuman Eddy, Ruth Graves, Lynda Johnson Robb, Jean Sisco, Anne Richardson, Loretta Barrett, Arthur White and so many others.
The “RIF bookmobile” was my mom’s dream brought to life. In 1967, Ford Motor Company donated a white van fitted with bookshelves. This allowed the books to be shared with several schools during the summers. I never was able to see her with the bookmobile, but I thought this was a wonderful photo of her with Barbara Atkinson and a local musician. Children and volunteers joined together to paint the first bookmobile with a V and a child sitting in the middle reading a book. The RIF bookmobile became almost as well known as the ice cream truck. Malcolm Taylor, one of the drivers, was like the Pied Piper. When the children heard the “ooga ooga” of his horn, they’d run behind the truck to the next stop. Initially he did the distributions without much help, and he cared for the children like a father, sometimes dipping into his own resources to provide for special needs. Later, he’d do five locations a day, and volunteers met the van and would read with children and sometimes do arts and crafts as well as other special projects.
Mom loved children. She wanted to open their lives to the world through reading and fun. She was a prankster and loved a good time. She had a great sense of humor and like the seven dwarfs, she loved to whistle while she worked. She filled my early life with stories; every night before bed we would read a Golden Book or children’s classic that she had ordered through the mail. Mom was always full of ideas for plays, building sets and making costumes. We sold tickets for our plays to the neighborhood. On my Halloween birthday she would appear in costume, generally as a witch or ghost, and tell stories with props, including grapes for witch eyes, cold spaghetti for hair and on one occasion she dressed as a Charles Addams character with a live baby alligator on her arm. Mom loved the written word. When away from home I would receive manila envelopes filled with articles, which I “must read” with Mom’s comments in the margins about people, politics, the arts, poverty, children, poetry, and quotes from all manner of people.
When she was not with children and family, she was working as a volunteer for the PTA, the Polio Foundation, the League of Women Voters, the Juvenile Court Advisory Council, and many other national and public service groups when she moved to D. C. This work strengthened her belief that volunteers can be as productive as any business or government professional. Her belief was validated. Thousands of RIF volunteers have become the centerpiece of 18,000 RIF sites in 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories. She would be particularly proud to know that many RIF kids have passed along their love and dedication to RIF to their children and grandchildren. It is an amazing legacy.
In celebration of RIF’s 40th birthday in 2006, when I spoke with Michel Martin on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, many RIF kids now in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s called in to the station to tell their stories and to say they still have their RIF books. Now that is a statement about the power of one woman’s idea that bore fruit and inspired thousands of people to plant new trees of books for millions of children.
Anne Hazard Richardson was a founding member of RIF and served as Chairman of RIF’s Board of Directors from 1981 to 1996.
Since 2002, her daughter Nancy Richardson Carlson has directed a district-wide mentoring program in Vermont that supports middle school youth to achieve their potential through close personal and supportive relationships with caring adults.
Nancy Richardson Carlson
Nancy recalls:
I was only twelve years old when our mom started volunteering in Washington during the first years of RIF. She would help plan the book distributions, organize teams of volunteers, ask people for donations. She did everything. And she loved it! For 15 years she chaired RIF’s board. I remember her saying how lucky she felt that the perfect cause had found her. Our father understood the meaning and reward that she derived from her connection with amazing RIF volunteers around the country. He wrote, “I am not aware of any other voluntary organization that, in proportion to its size, does more for the future of our children and country.”
When our mother retired from her role as Chair of the RIF Board, my two sons and my brother Henry’s daughter spoke from a podium they could not see over to thank their grandmother for all she’d done to inspire in them a love of reading. In looking through files at home in hopes of finding a record of their words that day, I found instead a journal entry my younger son had written at age 10, a couple of months after his grandmother had died, about his earliest memory. From hearing the rest of us reminisce about his Gammy, he had realized that he had not had the chance to know her fully before she had become sick at the end of her life. In his journal, he described sitting in his grandmother’s lap in the loft of the Richardson’s home in Eastham, Massachusetts while she read aloud to him. He wrote about the “bright, dazzling light…filtering in through the windows’” and went on to say:
I’ve never really known Gammy as her entire and complete person, but I have been able to piece together a perception of her, using memories just like this one. She has always struck me as a woman who feels the need to spread her light, to fill in every dark recess with all the goodness within her – which justifies her leadership of organizations such as RIF (Reading Is Fundamental), and for that matter her desire to assist anyone in need. Indeed, her personality seems to be very similar to the light that was brightening the room we were reading in.
I have in a frame on my desk at home a quote from my mother that summarizes her commitment to improving the lives of children: What we do may be as small as helping a child learn to read, or as big as founding a large organization that will serve children for years to come. But there is no greater satisfaction than freely giving our time and talents to make life better for someone else.
Her passion for RIF and its mission inspired hundreds of people that she met over the years. She also instilled in us a deep appreciation for the work of volunteers and what they can accomplish. It is no accident that my own work involves building a community of over one hundred volunteer mentors.
-Nancy Richardson Carlson
Anne Richardson with D.C. RIF kids at John Adams Elementary School in 1986.
The Anne Richardson RIF Volunteer of the Year Award was founded in 1998 by a gift from her husband, the late U.S. Attorney General and Ambassador Elliot L. Richardson. Many friends of the Richardsons have since generously contributed to the endowment to honor Anne Richardson’s lifetime of volunteer service and salute the hundreds of thousands of RIF volunteers who inspire children to become lifelong readers.
MEMORY MONDAY is a month-long feature in anticipation of RIF’s 43rd birthday on November 3. Each Monday until that birthday Rasco from RIF will feature RIF memories from someone affiliated with RIF from the very earliest days.
I don’t know that I have ever labeled many, if any, private non-profit Board meetings “exciting” in my lifetime of such meetings, but we just completed a great one at RIF! Over the last two days the RIF Board and staff have had the opportunity to meet, learn and discuss all things children’s literacy with our Literature Advisory Board (LAB).
Our discussions at these gatherings focused primarily on Multicultural Literature, Reading and the Media as well as Boys and Reading. It has been a lively two days coupled with the usual fall business session of the Board.
Members of the LAB joining us were: Dr. Elaine Aoki, a principal from Seattle, Dr. Rosalina B. Barrera of Texas State University-San Marcos, Loretta Barrett of New York (representing the RIF Board on the LAB), Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop of The Ohio State University, Dr. Wanda Brooks of Temple University, Dr. Evelyn Freeman of The Ohio State University, Dr. Darwin Henderson of The University of Cincinnati, Dr. Jonda McNair of Clemson University and Dr. Debbie Reese from The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
All of us are energized for the start of FY10 and moving forward on the goals for the coming year!
As the invitation to this weekend’s ceremony honoring the 2009 VERY BEST IN YOUTH notes: Some kids wait until they finish school to change the world. You are invited to meet 24 exceptional young people who couldn’t wait that long.
Nestlé has proudly sponsored the biennial Nestlé Very Best In Youth program for more than 12 years. The program was created to spotlight the best in youth leadership and identifies teens whose efforts are making a significant impact in lives other than their own. The initiative is led by Kenneth W. Bentley, Nestlé Vice President of Community Affairs & Educational Programs, whom we are proud to have as a member of the RIF Board.
Meet the 2009 winners, note the significance of literacy in many of their lives and marvel in all their accomplishments!
