Police officers and firefighters visited children at a Hoopoe Books Share Literacy event to help them learn the importance of good reading and thinking skills.
The northern California chapter of Share Literacy located in Los Altos, California, mission is to reduce the growing literacy gap between rich privileged and poor at risk children and their families. Share Literacy promotes the development of reading and thinking skills by partnering with established early childhood education agencies serving poverty-level and low-income families, with after-school programs and with organizations providing ESL and adult literacy instruction. For information or to donate to this charity, click here.
Hoopoe Books Share Literacy Program distributed 23,240 books this year to help over 16,500 underserved Bay Area children learn reading and thinking skills, has received a $90,000 grant from the Kaiser Permanente Community Grants Program.
Just in time for the holidays, the grant will help spread cheer to children with the donation of over 10,000 Hoopoe books to charitable organizations and schools serving needy families. The books (some bi-lingual English-Spanish) are earmarked for holiday gift/toy programs. An additional 7,500 books have been requested for give-away programs in early 2009.
The Children’s Book Project/East Bay distributed 3,000 books to organizations including: the Oakland Housing Authority, Oakland Library (Second Start Program); Clinica de la Raza (affiliated with Reach Out and Read) East Oakland; Berkeley Library, Berkeley Reads, All or None of Us (a project of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children), Richmond chapter; and schools in the unified school districts of Oakland, Hayward, San Lorenzo, Alameda, San Pablo and Union City.
