- The supply chain and logistics of collecting, organizing, and distributing food matches the logistics for magazines – so the infrastructure is in place.
- Food meets basic human needs. Magazines for literacy meet basic learning needs.
- Variety in the diet is critical for good health. Magazines offer tremendous reading variety for every age, reading level, subject area.
- A magazine drive operates just like a food drive, but feeds children and families hungry to read.
- Most retail magazine purchases by consumers happen at grocery stores.
- Adults unable to read where once children who didn’t learn how – like filling empty food shelves, getting reading materials into homes attacks a significant root cause of poverty
There are many valuable and important reading materials, but we know that magazines are especially powerful literacy resources for:
- Child Literacy
- Family Literacy
- Financial Literacy
- Health and Nutrition Literacy
Magazine Harvest combines the enormous operational and delivery machines of magazine distribution and food distribution at every point in the supply chain. Food banks and community or regional hunger relief initiatives serve vast networks of organizations that get food to people in many ways. Ultimately, our mission is to get magazines into the hands, hearts, and homes of at-risk children and families – so matching magazine distribution with food distribution is very effective.
A magazine harvest is like food gleaning, a practice that is thousands of years old, where crops left in the field are gathered by humanitarians to feed hungry people, except this harvest feeds children and families hungry to read and succeed by sending the magazines we all love to families via food pantries, nutrition education, mentoring, and job training programs.
iMAGine the possibilities:
Imagine a hungry family finding a wonderful children’s magazine in their bag of groceries from a food pantry – or selecting magazines of their own. Imagine a mother and her child arriving at a homeless or domestic violence shelter with no possessions, finding safety, settling in, reading magazines to pass the time, then, each child leaving with a magazine labeled to say it’s their very own.
If a family receives a bag of groceries from a food pantry, then let’s get magazines into those bags, so they get into homes.
When a mom or a dad visits a food pantry, imagine a coffee table or a newsstand where they can select their own magazines to bring home.
If a child is taking food home in a back-pack to get their family through the weekend, then let’s get some magazines into those back-packs.
If we want to inspire eating good food, then food and cooking magazines can be helpful.
There are programs that train homeless or underemployed people to be chefs that can benefit from libraries of culinary magazines.
As long as it doesn’t interfere with food operations, a partnership with a food pantry or food bank can provide a facility for literacy operations where magazines are collected, sorted, and picked up by member agencies. There can be a wonderful synergy that benefits to food warehouse by bringing more volunteers to the facility who may also want to help in other ways. Because agencies come to food banks for food supplies, it’s natural to tap that supply chain for magazine distribution.
iMAGine… and make it so!