With most of the world celebrating one official year of COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines, we can all agree on one thing.
The last twelve months have sucked. While there’s finally some light finally at the end of the tunnel, we are just starting to realize how much economic damage the Coronavirus pandemic has done. And how long it will take to recover, repair and even rebuild.
One thing that has been hit particularly hard is children’s literacy.
For the past year, many kids have been denied access to their school library, the best source of reading material for far too many of them.
And the very same libraries that have been shuttered this last year as a public health measure now face very uncertain futures. Public schools are likely going to see considerable funding disruptions in the coming years. And when school money is cut, school libraries are usually the first casualties.
Making sure kids had a decent school library wasn’t exactly the top priority for a lot of schools before (most of them forced into a regular routine of pinching pennies and cutting nickels by constant government cutbacks) and you can only imagine how much more grim that situation is going to become when governments cut even deeper as the world tries to dig itself out of the COVID-19 hole.
Study after study after study has proven that denying kids reading material during their formative years has a detrimental effect on their long term education. But the cold, ugly reality is that governments at all levels are confronting a stark economic landscape.
So what do we do?
Well, when a major retailer offers assistance, you take it.
Everyone should know about Indigo’s Love of Reading Foundation, a literacy fund Canada’s largest book store created to help under-funded and under privileged public school libraries across the country. Begun in 2004, it has raised over thirty-one million dollars and impacted over a million kids’ lives in the process. But neither Indigo nor it’s Love of Reading Foundation have been immune to COVID’s insidious impact.
But when adversity comes knocking, you can either lie down and die or you can adapt. Instead of surrendering, Indigo and it’s Love of Reading Fund evolved. So last April, the Buy-A-Book, Change-A-Life program was born.
Since collecting donations from customers either hasn’t been an option as a result of numerous lockdowns or has been a tough ask with many patrons becoming more budget conscious, Indigo has been donating partial proceeds from every Baby, Kids and Young Reader’s book purchased at any of its stores (Indigo, Chapters, IndigoSpirit, and Coles) as well as Indigo.ca to its Love of Reading Foundation.
The program has run the entire fiscal year and will end this Wednesday (March 31st). So that means for the rest of the month, every time someone buys a book for their burgeoning young reader they are helping other kids read as well.
This isn’t the only time Indigo has leveraged it’s retail presence into dollars for struggling school libraries and youth initiatives. Last year it partnered with Mattel and donated partial proceeds from every Barbie doll it sold during the Christmas season to the Love of Reading fund. And those Barbie dollars were earmarked specifically to help close the dream gap (the belief many girls-some as young as five-have that their gender limits both their potential and they’re dreams). That initiative ran the last several months of the year and raised money until December 31st.
The creation and distribution of a vaccine is merely the first step in recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. It could take years to heal from the economic damage and we could well be dealing with the fallout years after that. Recovery is going to require no shortage of agile innovation.
But neither compassion nor charity should be casualties of that recovery and we have to keep an eye on tomorrow. And that means feeding the minds, spirits and imaginations of tomorrow’s leaders and innovators. If we fail that, it doesn’t matter how much we recover today because the future will be lost.
Have a birthday coming up? Looking for a last minute Easter present? Need something to keep someone’s imaginative appetite fed? Or just keep them entertained while winter spring completely erases the winter? Then buy a book and help change two lives.
During these post Coronavirus times, what better way to spend your consumer dollars?
Image via www.indigo.ca
