We received this note today from Lindsey who helped lead the Florida network of hunger relief agencies and returned home to Alabama to create the CORE Store to provide teachers with much needed school supplies and reading materials.
Just wanted to say thanks to your donors! Our teacher picked these up today for his middle schoolers and we’re so excited to use them in a lesson. This is his first year teaching and these materials are helping him stock his classroom.
Lindsey, who also helped us connect pallets of National Wildlife Federation children’s magazines to the Florida foodbank network, and so many other community literacy leaders, represent the last mile of our literacy pipeline into eager hands, homes, and hearts. So, when we get a call about boxes of Trusted Media Brands Taste of Home culinary magazines in Milwaukee, or 200,000 Cricket Media magazines on a loading dock in Des Moines, or like many calls we’ve received from Highlights for Children, or Meredith, or Condé Nast, or Hearst, or National Geographic, or to pick-up monthly supplies of Columbus Monthly and other Dispatch portfolio magazines, or the dream we have to rescue every single expired retail newsstand copy from bookstores and grocery stores to give to at-risk readers, we can mobilize our teams and our industry partners, like Quad logistics, to do whatever it takes to rescue them to feed people hungry to read.
Lindsey’s CORE Store Literacy Newsstand is a model we are spreading to other communities. We’ve just set up a similar partnership with a community leader in Cleveland that will be receiving direct shipments from our consumers who love to share their favorite titles. Our local teams are delivering magazines via literacy newsstands in food pantries, youth mentoring, and job training programs in Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Connecticut, Florida, California, Toronto, and a growing list of communities, coast to coast.
With titles for every age, interest, professional aspiration, and language, magazines and comics are the most powerful literacy engines on the planet. Join us to iMAGine what’s possible and to change lives for good.
