Call to action: There is a children’s reading crisis in the USA that started before the pandemic and has been worsened by it. Most children in poverty have zero books at home. Together, with your help, we can change that today!
In 2022, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted a special administration of the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments for age 9 students to examine student achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading compared to 2020. This is the largest average score decline in reading since 1990
Scores rose significantly between 1999 and 2012, then began to decline until the start or the COVID pandemic, followed by a sharp decline.
Print children’s magazines are especially powerful for literacy that changes lives for good
Print children’s magazines are especially powerful for children when they are developing vital life-long reading habits. Children’s magazines promote language development and family bonding when young minds are experiencing their most rapid growth. Studies show that print reading materials held in hands cause a touch or “haptic” response in the brain that increases reading comprehension and retention. With your help, we are able to deliver valuable reading materials into the hands, homes, and hearts of at-risk children and families, while also supporting the teachers and other literacy leaders who care so much about promoting literacy.
Every month is children’s magazine month
Please join our industry-wide celebration of Children’s Magazine Month in October, and every month.
Reading is where it all begins. Literacy changes lives for good.
If you’ve ever mentored a middle school or high school student, you know that a child unable to read is lost – unable to do well in any school subject. Adults unable to read were once children who didn’t learn how.
We’ve all heard the stories about teachers who reach deep down into their pockets to provide their students with much needed school supplies.
Our very first project used funds collected at a company holiday fundraiser to buy Highlights for Children for 90 Columbus, Ohio elementary school children for three years. Soon after, a business owner near Dayton sponsored Spider magazine for two elementary school classrooms, and then a company in Madison, Wisconsin gifted magazines to Schenk Elementary school there.
Our first recycling project was the collection of favorite magazines organized by a classroom of San Francisco kindergarten students for children in a nearby homeless shelter, and a family has been stocking a literacy newsstand in a Toronto food pantry for almost a decade. Recently, we partnered with a Los Angeles literacy leader to rescue and deliver a donor’s entire comic book collection to an East L.A. school. In rural Alabama, we partner with an education foundation that operates a school supply closet for teachers, shipping them National Geographic and other magazines, and we’ve partnered with College Mentors for Kids in Indiana, Illinois, and New York, schools and youth programs in Jamaica, Uganda, Croatia, Nicaragua, and the central and Kashmir regions of India, a Mississippi newspaper gifting every school child with a magazine, and even airlifted to Inuit schools north of the Arctic Circle to bring magazines for literacy to thousands of students and their families.
iMAGine what’s possible and join with us to make literacy happen for children and families.
Share the literacy love
Help fund our children’s literacy campaign – 100% or your financial support is used to deliver new and good condition recycled magazines to literacy programs supporting at-risk children and families eager to read.
MagLiteracy.org is a nonprofit, all volunteer initiative conceived with publisher support in 1994 and incorporated in 2004 as the Magazine Publishers Family Literacy Project, a 501c3 charitable education organization. Our mission is to use the untapped potential of magazines to promote literacy. Since then, we have provided magazines donated by publishers and individuals to over a million at-risk children and their families in the U.S. and abroad. MagLiteracy.org is the first and only project of its kind and ambition in the world. Our headquarters are in Columbus, OH, with additional locations in Madison, WI, the Mississippi Delta, Toronto, and more.
Thank you!