Here are some simple, stunning facts about why print magazines and comics are so enormously powerful for #literacy here in the U.S. and everywhere in the world.
With titles for every reading age and interest, magazines are the most powerful literacy engines on the planet. Consider how your own favorite magazines as a child, teen, and adult have enriched and inspired your dreams. Here FIPP, the global trade association for magazines, illustrates why we love them:
Reading is where it all begins. Adults unable to read where once children who didn’t learn how. A child unable to read is severely disadvantaged in every school subject. Poor readers struggle with job applications and training, doctor’s instructions, and websites.
People unable to read are less wealthy, less healthy, less safe, less free, less sheltered, and more hungry, as is our nation and world.
Reading is Fundamental says that most children and families in poverty have zero books at home. With the newsstand’s endless supply of beautiful magazines, we can fix that today.
Chicago researchers have found that poor infants in the U.S. hear 30 million fewer words when their brains are wiring for life. With magazines like Hello from Highlights for Kids and Baby Bug from Cobblestone, and Storytime, and so many more, we can close that gap now. 
Each night, 35,000 women and children leave everything they know and own behind to seek safety in a domestic violence shelter with an average stay of one to two months. With magazines, we can comfort and empower them tonight.
There are over a million homeless students hidden in every U.S. school district. With magazines, we can give them hope for a better tomorrow. 
Worldwide, hundreds of millions of eager readers, including over 250 million children lack literacy fuel in any format. The most earnest builders of schools and libraries overseas are reaching just over 10 million souls. Well over 360 million magazines are printed nearly every month worldwide in every common language – timely and timeless – a firehose of new gifts, or gently enjoyed and recycled consumer and publisher back issues available to quench the global literacy thirst.
Boating and woodworking magazines sent to Rocking the Boat on the Bronx River help build wooden boats and the lives of young people crafting them.
Culinary magazine sent to homeless and unemployed training to become chefs at Episcopal Community Services in San Francisco and the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, and others teach contemporary food preparation and presentation skills, and even math to people hungry to feed their families and ours. 
Magazines of every type sent to youth mentoring programs help to break the ice and form bonds around common interests. 
MagazineLiteracy.org is rallying the publishing industry to unleash their awesome promotional prowess across all media platforms to inspire consumer and business enthusiasts to end illiteracy and poverty by sharing their favorite new and recycled magazine gifts with kindred at-risk readers. They get there via a ready pipeline of food pantries, homeless and domestic violence shelters, youth mentoring and job training programs, foster care, and schools and libraries in the most distressed corners of the U.S. and world.
Thank you Mr. Magazine for keeping the flame that lights our way burning bright.
Join us. Tell the world.
