N. Seattle Boys & Girls Book Drive
Donation protected
February 15th, 2017 -- February 28th 2017
This is a project to raise money for the purpose of purchasing new youth/young adult literature for the book collection at the North Seattle Boys & Girls Club. The funds will be used specifically for the purchasing of multicultural literature, of stories focused on people that belong to minorities, in order to expand and diversify the collection of books available to the children who are membersat this location. As part of the process of setting up this fundraiser, I have been in contact with Jesse Bernstein, the educational director at the North Seattle Boys & Girls Club. The goal is to raise $400 dollars, which, after deducting the fees charged by GoFundMe and their donation processing service, should allow us to purchase between 30-40 new books. The books that will be purchased aren't determined at this time, but the selection process for them will be based both on editorial reviews and awards granted by organizations dedicated to multiculturalism in youth literature (the Coretta Scott King Book Award, Scholastic Asian Book Award, American Indian Youth Literature Award, etc).
Our $400 goal is a flexible one-- the more we make, the more books we'll be able to purchase for the collection at the North Seattle Boys & Girls Club. In speaking and meeting with Jesse, I found that this location provides services to over a hundred children at any given time on average, and that the cultural makeup of this base of members is pretty diverse. Their current collection of books is comprised largely of items donated by members of the community, and this fundraising effort will allow us to specifically choose books that will help fill in any gaps that may currently be present with regards to multicultural representation.
WHY
In 2015, the Cooperative Children's Book Center reviewed 3,400 children's books, and found that less than fifteen percent of them featured protagonists or other prominent characters that were people of color. In an essay for The New York Times , author Walter Dean Meyers discusses the dawning realization he experienced as a teenager as he, "a black teenager in a white-dominated world", came to realize that the stories he was reading weren't ones that he could relate to, didn't tell stories that reflected the "mosaic" of the environment he had grown up within. This drove him away from reading and writing for several years, until he read a story that was centered on people like those he knew, that was set in a setting that was familiar to him. As he puts it, "By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map". It is crucially important for children and teenagers to be able to see themselves in the stories that they read, and this fundraiser will go a long ways towards facilitating that.
This is a project to raise money for the purpose of purchasing new youth/young adult literature for the book collection at the North Seattle Boys & Girls Club. The funds will be used specifically for the purchasing of multicultural literature, of stories focused on people that belong to minorities, in order to expand and diversify the collection of books available to the children who are membersat this location. As part of the process of setting up this fundraiser, I have been in contact with Jesse Bernstein, the educational director at the North Seattle Boys & Girls Club. The goal is to raise $400 dollars, which, after deducting the fees charged by GoFundMe and their donation processing service, should allow us to purchase between 30-40 new books. The books that will be purchased aren't determined at this time, but the selection process for them will be based both on editorial reviews and awards granted by organizations dedicated to multiculturalism in youth literature (the Coretta Scott King Book Award, Scholastic Asian Book Award, American Indian Youth Literature Award, etc).
Our $400 goal is a flexible one-- the more we make, the more books we'll be able to purchase for the collection at the North Seattle Boys & Girls Club. In speaking and meeting with Jesse, I found that this location provides services to over a hundred children at any given time on average, and that the cultural makeup of this base of members is pretty diverse. Their current collection of books is comprised largely of items donated by members of the community, and this fundraising effort will allow us to specifically choose books that will help fill in any gaps that may currently be present with regards to multicultural representation.
WHY
In 2015, the Cooperative Children's Book Center reviewed 3,400 children's books, and found that less than fifteen percent of them featured protagonists or other prominent characters that were people of color. In an essay for The New York Times , author Walter Dean Meyers discusses the dawning realization he experienced as a teenager as he, "a black teenager in a white-dominated world", came to realize that the stories he was reading weren't ones that he could relate to, didn't tell stories that reflected the "mosaic" of the environment he had grown up within. This drove him away from reading and writing for several years, until he read a story that was centered on people like those he knew, that was set in a setting that was familiar to him. As he puts it, "By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map". It is crucially important for children and teenagers to be able to see themselves in the stories that they read, and this fundraiser will go a long ways towards facilitating that.
Organizer
Andrew Wagster
Organizer
Seattle, WA
