Every child has a story, and every story deserves to be heard.

We're Big Thinking Publishing, a small independent press in Lancashire that's spent years doing one thing on purpose: publishing the voices that mainstream publishing tends to walk straight past. Disabled authors, trans and queer authors, working-class authors, and writers who were told, in one way or another, that books weren't meant for people like them.

Now we want to do the same thing for the next generation, on the biggest scale we've ever attempted.

Around the world right now, children are writing stories, painting pictures and imagining impossible worlds, in bedrooms, classrooms, libraries and on scraps of paper wherever they can find them. Most of that creativity never travels further than the room it was made in, which is the precisely the part we want to change.

Beyond Borders is our answer to that. An international anthology of stories, poems and artwork by children and young people from every corner of the globe, put together as a real, physical, professionally published book, this is a project which tells every contributor their voice belongs in the world.

There's no competition here and no winners or losers, just a celebration of what young people can create when they're given the chance to be heard. Whether a child lives in a city, a village, a mountain community or a small island, their creativity matters just as much as anyone else's. We’re building this with schools, libraries and youth groups across the UK and internationally, including partnerships with twinned towns, so that a classroom here can end up published alongside a classroom on the other side of the world!

With your support, we'll be able to:

·      Invite submissions from children and young people across the globe

·      Publish these young people in a professionally produced international anthology

·      Celebrate young writers and artists from every culture and background

·      Give every participating school a certificate of recognition

·      Send every published contributor a copy of their own book -- a physical copy for UK-based writers and a digital copy for every writer worldwide

·      Keep participation free, so a family's financial circumstances are never the reason a child's story goes unheard

We've done this before on a smaller scale. Across seven past anthologies, all free to submit to and all with free digital downloads, over 200 individual writers have trusted us with their work. Beyond Borders is our biggest attempt yet at the same idea, just taken global.

Here's exactly where your money goes, because we think you deserve to know:

·      £600 to print and post a free copy to every contributor, guaranteed

·      £840 to fairly pay an editor who'll spend a full week curating, formatting and preparing the anthology for print

·      £260 kept back as a safety buffer, because we'd rather over-plan than come up short partway through!!

·      £1,700 in total, with anything raised beyond that going towards printing more copies and reaching more schools than the base plan allows

None of this is really about us. It's about a child somewhere in the world becoming a published author, quite possibly for the first time in their life.

When you back Beyond Borders, you're doing more than funding a book. You're telling a classroom in one country that a classroom in another wants to hear what they've got to say, and you're helping a small independent press take on something seriously ambitious for kids who are usually told to wait their turn.

Stories don't recognise borders, and we don't think opportunity should either.