My lifelong love for magazines started with reading Highlights at the dentist office – and I know I’m not alone in that experience. To this day, I can’t pass a Highlights without picking it up to look for hidden pictures. So reading magazines in the dentist office is the seed that grew to become MagazineLiteracy.org and dentists continue to receive and share so many wonderful magazines in their waiting areas with their patients. Let’s tap this enormous potential – putting a smile on the face of new readers, while your dentist brightens yours.
Organized literacy efforts among health professionals are not unprecedented. For example, Reach out and Read is an amazing program empowered by pediatric physicians. Dental offices receive many wonderful magazines each month to share with readers in their waiting rooms and cycle through them as new issues come in. We know from working with many dentist that they love the idea of giving the magazines a new life by sending them to our literacy programs.
Whether you are a dentist or a patient – contact us to help grow our “Make Readers Smile” project. Every dentist can participate – strengthening the breadth and depth of our magazine literacy supply chain. In addition to supplying their own magazines, the visibility can encourage patients to be involved too – perhaps by recycling their own magazines to new readers and volunteering to build up our local literacy teams.
I’m smiling already!