by John Mennell
Once a month, we hold a “First Sunday” magazine bundling event in our office to sort and create packages of recycled magazines for our literacy marketplace. I recently made the tactical error of starting off a welcoming pitch to a group of college students with a reference to CDs – not the financial kind – which turned a phalanx of eager volunteers into a sea of blank stares – tough crowd.

by John Mennell

So, you make magazines live again!

                 – A new reader and friend

Eight months ago I wrote a post about encountering a stranger in the street and vowed to know his name. Yesterday, within fifteen minutes of picking up bundles of recycled magazines for literacy from the post office, we had not only met again, exchanged names and laughs, but we found a common bond around a set of magazines I left with him to own and to read. I explained our literacy project to this man and he said “you make magazines live again.”
We know that magazines are special and enormously powerful for literacy. As experienced first-hand today, a magazine can help to foster conversation and laughter and forge a bond around common interests. This is why they are so valuable for children and teens in mentoring and tutoring programs. A magazine can be a rich possession for a child or mom in a domestic violence shelter or homeless person, or a foster child taken suddenly from everything they know and own.
Join us to change the world, one magazine, one new reader, one friend at a time.

by John Mennell
We’ve just secured our first newsstand magazine drive at a Whole Foods scheduled for Earth Month from store open to close on Saturday April 12th and Sunday April 13th in Madison, WI. Every wave begins with a ripple, every forest a seed – our goal is to mobilize shoppers to clear every magazine copy for delivery to readers via literacy programs – and then to replicate the Magazine Harvest coast-to-coast.

Andy and Craig were taken from their friends and families too soon and unexpectedly to make any sense.  Their soul mates – Tiffany and Carol – have payed their precious magazine collections forward to fuel literacy and self-esteem for at-risk readers, and to inspire a new generation of kindred spirits – READy for life!
Craig was an avid reader of car and aviation magazines who “received his pilot’s license before his driver’s license.” Craig’s wife Carol, who gifted Craig’s collection of thousands of magazines to MagazineLiteracy.org for new readers, told us, “I was really glad not to have them relegated to recycling and hope they will spur someone’s interest in cars or planes or history.”

Welcome to Shine United – one part ad agency, one part digital shop, one part nitrous-burning Chevy Nova with the pedal to the floor. At Shine, our thinking is bold, our ideas fresh, and our creative not for those in pursuit of the status quo.

Shine United likes to shake things up. This week they are sharing the magazine love by reading, then recycling magazines from their ad agency into our literacy pipeline – helping MagazineLiteracy.org to achieve our dream marriage between the magazine industry supply chain end-to-end – and our global humanitarian supply chain.
We know that people love to read and to share their magazines – especially for literacy. We also know that magazines are enormously powerful for literacy and that getting reading materials into homes can disrupt poverty.  The excellent quality magazines provided by Shine will be sent to new readers in homeless and domestic violence shelters, mentoring and job training programs, foster care, and into hands and homes via food banks and food pantries.  We look forward to learning lessons from this new partnership so that we can engage other partners, nationwide and around the world to replicate this wonderful idea.

Please share our Kitchen Gallery Culinary Magazine Drive poster and contact us to collect new and recycled magazines at your shop for literacy.
Learn more about the Kitchen Gallery magazine collection for literacy.

We celebrate our love in February. Ring the dinner bell and light the candles! We’ve cooked up an idea with the Kitchen Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin that we can serve up with any shop on every Main St. and every bookstore, grocery store, and airport newsstand in America.  A magazine harvest that connects a shop with its community and the patrons who love to read and share their favorite magazines as gifts for literacy. Consumers want to support literacy and job training and love that it is so easy and convenient to share magazine gifts at their favorite local shops.

Our literacy journey continued last night with this Disrupt Poverty talk at the amazing Center for Entrepreneurship in Liberal Education in Beloit (CELEB).  This tech start-up, art, media, maker, co-working space is staffed by a group of passionate young entrepreneurs and stocked with state-of-the-art equipment to rock our world – in a good way.

Today we had the great pleasure and privilege to spend the day with the awesomely talented Steve, Mic, Rachel, Matt, and Jon from Bendyworks – a world renowned agile software development shop in Madison, WI – to kick-off the design of our online Magazine Literacy Marketplace. When completed, this crowdfunded global marketplace will allow consumers and businesses to support literacy needs anywhere in the world with the new and recycled magazines that they love to read and share. Join us at magazineliteracy.org
Music: Bells by Michael Mennell

Bendyworks Designs Magazine Literacy Marketplace from MagazineLiteracy.org on Vimeo.

By John Mennell

Like food and water, literacy is essential for humans to thrive.

At MagLiteracy.org, we are blessed with so much generous support from thousands of donors and volunteers, and community leaders who make our mission possible. As I write this, I am $469 in to a $170 Facebook birthday fundraising campaign to support MagLiteracy.org.

I am sharing the details of this fundraiser to show a way you can bring in the much needed financial support that allows us to meet growing literacy needs. Whether it’s your birthday or any other idea that you have to inspire others to support your own MagLiteracy.org fundraising campaign, we appreciate every dollar you raise and gift to our literacy mission.

The people you know will support your fundraising if you support it yourself and tell your personal experiences. Here’s my story that I posted on Facebook.

by John Mennell
Conceived twenty and incorporated ten years ago – 2014 is a watershed for MagazineLiteracy.org – a time for renewal, reinvention and growth.  With titles for every age and interest, and arriving in hands, homes, and hearts every month of the year, magazines are especially powerful for literacy. We’ve been able to make this vision a reality with a growing army of volunteers – coast to coast, and around the world – and with generous media and technology support from literacy champions like Automattic (WordPress VIP), the Salesforce Foundation, Google for Non-profits, Shoplocket, CrowdSpring, TruScribe, Bendyworks, ENTP (Lighthouse), Crowdtilt (Crowdhoster), Sharetribe, and Balsamiq.

by John Mennell
Steve Blank – author of Four Steps to the Epiphany – is credited with launching the lean start-up movement, further evangelized by Eric Ries, Beth Kanter, and others.  A commandment of Blank’s “Customer Development” model is to “get out of the building” to discover, understand, and iterate toward the true nature of the relationship between your customers and your product or service.
At MagazineLiteracy.org we have foundational ideas about the special and enormous power of magazines for literacy, validated by the many testimonials we receive from literacy programs.  The holidays are the perfect opportunity to spend time with friends and family and to “get out of the building” to experience reading with others first-hand.

Consumers coast-to-coast are paying their favorite magazines forward by recycling them for literacy. Fully in the holiday and the recycling spirit, the magazines are arriving in every type of gift box imaginable, like this beautiful Vanity Fair magazine that arrived today with about 20 other gift magazines.
With titles for every age and interest, magazines are especially powerful for literacy. MagazineLiteracy.org gets favorite new and recycled magazines from throughout the magazine supply chain to literacy programs for at-risk readers – moms, dads, and children in shelters, mentoring and job training programs, and foster care.
Pay your magazines forward for literacy. Read them and then recycle them to put the powerful gift of literacy into the homes, hands, and hearts of children and families hungry to read.

Urban Land Interests – a force in Madison – are superheroes for providing us literacy logistics.
Thank you Urban Land Interests for helping to reshape our magazine recycling operations, so we can reach our full promise.

Thank you to Sherri, our Volunteer Coordinator, and the members of the University of Wisconsin Theta Chi Fraternity – Sam, Joe, Karsten, Jack, Alec, and Eric – who sorted and created 14 recycled magazine bundles for literacy. Theta Chi has a strong tradition of philanthropy in the Madison community.  The group gathered at the first of our monthly “First Sunday” magazine bundling events organized to sort and package magazines for posting in our online Magazine Literacy Marketplace.  The bundles of recycled magazines, donated by consumers and businesses coast-to-coast, will be delivered to literacy programs for at-risk readers – children and families in homeless and domestic violence shelters, mentoring and job training programs, hungry families fed by food pantries, and foster children.

From November 5-15th, Westfield Comics joined forces with Magazine Literacy, Comics For Heroes and Reading With Pictures to collect comics in Madison, Wisconsin. As a part of the Arctic Airlift for Literacy, Westfield Comics customers donated 447 comics and 14 trade paperbacks which will be sent up to Inuit schools and families in Kugluktuk, Taloyoak, Gjoa Haven, Kugaaruk and Cambridge Bay, Canada.

Those who brought in comics were supportive of our efforts to collect reading materials, offering their thoughts on using comics as a literacy tool and how reading comics helped them develop reading skills when they were younger.

The donated titles include a variety of material with stories for younger children and teens, positive male and female superhero role models, and genres like sci-fi, fantasy and more.
Thanks to Westfield Comics and everyone who participated in sharing these exciting stories and literacy tools!

MagazineLiteracy.org is the first and only global, magazine industry-wide literacy campaign for at-risk readers.
Freedom and prosperity depend on literacy.
Magazines are especially powerful literacy resources.
MagazineLiteracy.org gets new and recycled magazines to literacy programs for at-risk children, teens, and adults via the Magazine Literacy Marketplace, where:

1. Literacy Programs register and define their literacy goals and magazine needs by reader, topic or title, quantity and frequency – then create literacy wish lists, and order new and recycled magazines for their readers.
2. Magazine Suppliers – Volunteers, consumers, and publishers supply recycled and new magazines to match Literacy Program needs, wish lists, and orders.
3. Literacy Funders – individuals, groups, and businesses donate funds to get new and recycled magazines from Magazine Suppliers to Literacy Programs for at risk-readers.

100% of funds donated by Literacy Funders is used to delivery new and recycled magazines to Literacy Programs for at-risk readers.
Highly leveraged, lean operations are funded by industry angels and private donors.
MagazineLiteracy.org is a 501(c)(3) charity.
Join us.

Feed children and families hungry to read. October is Children’s Magazine Month. We are celebrating by increasing our volunteer literacy force – coast to coast and beyond!
Join us. Share the magazine love!

Magazines are flying off the shelves at this newsstand.
We’ve partnered with Dane County food pantries and today made our first magazine deliveries and set up a magazine newsstand at the River Food Pantry in time for 250+ families who arrived this evening for groceries and a hot meal.