Achieve Brown County Outcome Area: Early Grade Reading
Achieve Brown County Pillar: Shared Community Vision,
Achieve Brown County Partner Author: Kaelyn Ahola, Achieve Brown County Backbone Team
Every year, the Give-A-Kid-A-Book campaign gets new, smells-like-it’s-straight-off-the-printer, books in the hands of kids for the holidays. Don’t get me wrong, all (most) books are great, but there is something magical about being the first—the first to crack the spine, to make a note in the margins, to unstick the edges of a few pages from each other. It feels like that book is yours, created and procured just for you. Feeling special, feeling valuable and seen though a book goes beyond that singular novel. It makes you curious. It makes you crave more.
Anyone can (and probably will) tell you that the digital age is rotting our brains. But in my humble opinion, I think it’s more removing our desire for curiosity. We have the whole world at our thumb-tips. Why be curious when you can just know something, whenever you want? We have removed the mystic for wondering, pondering, and furthermore the almost indescribable insatiable craving for knowing; the one where you stay up WAY TOO LATE because you must read “just one more” chapter.
Giving a kid a book is giving a kid the appetite to think about the possibilities out there AND the practical skills (literacy) to make possibilities, turned opportunities, turned realities.
So, on one of those terribly slippery snowy days of December, my co-workers and I—aka the Achieve Brown County backbone team—showed up at a deserted Shopko to volunteer to Give-A-Kid-A-Book. Parents and grandparents and guardians, swaddled up like that kid from a Christmas Story, signed in for their spot at the “Salvation Army Holiday Assistance Program” and were ushered though the gifts they could pick out for their kids.
We, along with an entire team of librarians and volunteers, gave 6,000 kids a book.
Six. Thousand. Kids.
That’s like, well over half of the capacity of the Resch Center.
That’s like, 14x the number of sturgeons harvested in the Winnebago system last year.
That’s like, if you counted to 6,000, it would take you 1 hour and 40 mins to do it (or something close to that).
Sometimes I think we forget how big a number like that really is, and the possibility of that number. It’s 6,000 chances. It’s 6,000 people that could be opening a book that reignites a curiosity lost to the stagnancy of instant gratification. Or even just starts the wonder in the first place.
In my world at Achieve Brown County, sometimes (most times) the work of a collective impact organization can feel slow. Really slow. Systems change isn’t for the faint of heart. Having moments to witness the sparks of (lit)eracy being struck, it makes going back to the slow work more meaningful—even a bit more tolerable.
Sometimes there are tough days. Really tough. Those days are when I am most reminded of hope. I go to my bookshelf, crack open one of my many TBR books and remind myself what it feels like to be the first, what it feels like to be valuable and seen.
Because I was given the opportunity to be curious.
I was given the possibilities of wondering.
I know what it feels like to have books that can change the (my, our) world.
Shout out to the players who made that very frigid, very magical day possible
- Friends of the Brown County Library: for book collecting, curating, and distributing
- The Salvation Army: for hosting the event
- Achieve Brown County: for encouraging my involvement to volunteer
