Near Earth Day, 2006, MagazineLiteracy.org launched KinderHarvest, an effort that combines the three R’s of education – reading, writing, and arithmetic – with the three R’s of recycling – reduce, reuse, and recycle – to form the three R’s of literacy:
Read, Recycle, & Reuse.
- Read – We love to read magazines! Magazines are informative, entertaining, topical, timely, and colorful. Reading magazines produces joy for people of all ages. Magazines are an important resource for teachers and other community literacy agents helping children and adults learn to read.
- Recycle – Help set up a project in your community to collect recent, gently used magazines. Think of collection points that are convenient for your neighbors, places where people go on a regular and frequent basis, such as the public library, a book or magazine store, a school, church, bank, or supermarket. Ask permission to set up a KinderHarvest magazine literacy collection bin.
- Reuse – Reach out to community programs that serve young people or adults who would enjoy reading the magazines. Ask them about who and how many children, adults or families they serve and what kinds of magazines would be most helpful, based on needs, interests, gender, and age. So each can receive a magazine in good condition, that they can call their own, and to respect the privacy of donors, carefully remove any mailing labels or cover label information with a black permanent marker. Then put a MagazineLiteracy.org gift label on each magazine and deliver them to the community agencies you have found.
Children and families arrive at homeless and domestic violence shelters with no possessions. Each could receive a wonderful magazine gift from your KinderHarvest project with their very own name on the label. Hundreds of families near every community rely on bags of groceries they receive from food pantries. How wonderful it would be to feed children and families hungry to read and succeed by inserting a magazine in each grocery bag. Be a literacy agent of change in the lives of others by seeking out these programs, early learning programs, after-school mentoring and nutrition programs in your community, understanding their needs and collecting wonderful magazines from your neighbors for reuse.