What is your favorite children’s book? Which one made you fall in love with reading, or which one do you still remember to this day? That’s the first question that Molly, our volunteer coordinator, asks when a group of us volunteers sat down in the Children’s Book Bank for a beloved Honors Service Project. Led by Jill Taylor and Brianna Avery, this recurring service opportunity partners with Children’s Book Bank, now merged with SMART Reading, a community-driven, volunteer organization that strives to expand the opportunities for children across Oregon to engage in reading and “to spark joy and opportunity through the magic of a shared book,” as their mission states. As we went around in a circle sharing our favorite stories, like Goodnight Moon and Stella Luna, we were encouraged to remember just how impactful books can be for children, and especially that children are given access to these books in the home. For the Children’s Book Bank, this fact is central to their goal of bringing books to the low income neighborhoods they serve where the “book gap,” which describes the inequitable opportunities for literacy development, persists. As they describe it, “For children in poverty, one of the biggest obstacles to literacy development (which begins at birth) is the scarcity of books in the home. While the ratio of books to children in middle-income neighborhoods is approximately 13 books to 1 child, the ratio in low-income neighborhoods is a mere 1 book to 300 children.”
For children in poverty, one of the biggest obstacles to literacy development (which begins at birth) is the scarcity of books in the home. While the ratio of books to children in middle-income neighborhoods is approximately 13 books to 1 child, the ratio in low-income neighborhoods is a mere 1 book to 300 children.
Our job during our session was to grab a stack of books from the mountains of donated books lining the walls of the warehouse to inspect, clean, and ensure their quality before distribution. Molly reminded us that any one of the books we worked on that day could end up being the book these children still remember in twenty years or that sparks their love of reading. After giving us some cleaning instructions, we got to work taping up little tears, scraping off stickers, and erasing rogue doodles. As we scrubbed and wiped clean covers, Molly walked us through the programs they run to serve our communities and promote children’s literacy with a practiced and heartfelt guidance that she’s given to the dozens of groups of volunteers that come in every day. The Building Home Libraries program serves every Head Start and Early Head Start program in Multnomah County through hand-curating individual bundles of fourteen books varying in reading level and subject targeted toward each child receiving it. They also have the Free Book Fair program which, serving K-12 students, held twelve fairs last year offering over 1,300 books each for students to look through to take seven or eight home for themselves.
As I worked through my stack, I flipped through bright book covers I’d never seen before and nostalgia-tinged titles that reminded me of sitting on colorful rugs while my teachers read to me. It was inspiring being surrounded by thousands of books and the volunteers that dedicated themselves to delivering them to kids who need them most. We chatted about the reasons we were all here and found a lot of similarities in our connections to reading. After learning about this volunteer opportunity through the Honors newsletter, one volunteer said they signed up because they liked the idea of helping give more children the opportunity to get into reading as they loved reading as a child. Noah, another Honors volunteer, said “I’ve worked in education for the last ten years or so and I really support giving kiddos access to more books.” Orion told us this was his second time volunteering and that, “it’s really fun and feels like a really nice way to get involved directly.”
Though we had one small part in a massive, state-wide effort, it was a great reminder that in pursuit of making a difference, there are so many ways, large and small, that you can contribute. Molly told us about a recent study they’ve been talking about in the center which compared homes with no books in them to homes with one book in them and found that the children in homes with one book went on to have higher levels on average of education, empathy, literacy, and numeracy. She said, “If one book can make that big of an impact, imagine what all these books can do and all the books you’ve cleaned today. We definitely wouldn’t be able to do what we do without volunteers like you.” It is one thing to speak about the inequities in our society or the systems that create them in classrooms, but the Honors College ensures that we find opportunities to see where changes can be made, learn more about who is trying to change them, and be agents of that change ourselves.
If one book can make that big of an impact, imagine what all these books can do and all the books you’ve cleaned today. We definitely wouldn’t be able to do what we do without volunteers like you.