Dear Friends –
MagLiteracy.org is at an existential fork in our amazing journey – our moonshot. One path leads to achieving everything we set out to be. Please read through this personal note that lays out the way forward.
Our literacy mission and work together is extraordinary – engaging the enormous literacy power of magazines on an ambitious humanitarian scale never achieved at any time, anywhere in the world.
You can see in all our stories that our focus and impact is special and uniquely powerful for changing lives, families, and communities for good. Our literacy mission is needed now more than ever, as National Center for Education Statistics data shows a growing reading crisis that began well before the COVID pandemic.
Literacy ends poverty of the mind, heart, and pocket. Reading is where it all begins. With titles for every age, enthusiasm, professional aspiration, and language, and the fact that holding printed stories – ink on paper – connects with the brain in a way that improves reading comprehension and retention, print magazines are the most powerful literacy engines on earth. Let’s not let this powerful tool slip from our grasp.
Together, we have demonstrated every possibility that we have dreamed, because we, YOU keep showing up to invest your time, talent, and treasure. Consumers love the favorite magazine brands that reflect who they are, and love love love to share their magazine passions with at-risk readers to promote literacy and joy.
However, like the hundreds of thousands of at-risk readers we reach, MagLiteracy.org needs support to achieve its full literacy promise. Our growth exceeds our individual funding capacity, and we need larger financial commitments now to continue to operate at the scale necessary to meet known and emerging literacy needs and opportunities.
We are an all-volunteer logistics operation that has been able to move millions of reading materials in boxes and on pallets, gifted by consumers and publishers, into our distribution centers and out to literacy programs and readers, thanks to the big hearts and enormous contributions made by champion people and companies.
Volunteers sort and deliver magazines from our Ohio, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Toronto, and other facilities.
Our consumer and business recyclers collect and ship their favorite magazines and cherished collections.
Publishers and distributors like PubWorX, and retail newsstands like Barnes & Noble, donate boxes and pallets of beautiful magazines. We’ve received another 100,000 Cricket Media magazines this week, and millions from publishers like the National Wildlife Federation, Owl Hill Media, Highlights for Children, Trusted Media Brands, Hearst, Condé Nast, Meredith, Time, National Geographic, Sesi, Culturs, Success, the National Historical Maritime Society, The Sun, Yankee, Skeptic, the Columbus Dispatch Co., and more.
Commercial development, logistics, and transportation companies, like Urban Land Interests in Madison Wisconsin, the Atrium Company in Johnstown Ohio, where we operate the first large-scale Magazine Literacy Bank – like a foodbank for literacy, and Quad and Schneider house us, do our heavy lifting, and transport truckloads of literacy materials end-to-end through our literacy pipeline.
Industry pundits like Samir Husni, Bo Sacks, Linda Ruth, Linda Thomas Brooks, and Joe Berger tell our stories.
We need your help now to secure necessary funds to underwrite our operations. More than ever, I need your assistance assembling financial investments to cover the logistics costs to receive, transport, process, and deliver our magazine supply to waiting literacy programs, and into the hands, homes, and hearts of the current and next generation of eager readers.
Please donate what you can now at MagLiteracy.org. We leverage every dollar of personal financial support to make enormous literacy impacts.
Please reply to help locate the larger game-changing financial donations we need before the end of the year to exist and continue on our amazing journey, so we can reach our full magazine literacy promise.
As Ken Johnson, our Wisconsin leader says, the image above says it all.
Let’s iMAGine what’s possible and make it so!
Godspeed to you and yours this holiday season.
With utmost gratitude –
John
John Mennell
Founder