MagLiteracy will participate in the Mount Vernon Farmers Market at the Public Square on June 1, Aug. 3, Sept. 7 and Oct. 5. A selection of magazines will be available at no cost at their booth, along with outreach information for food banks interested in ordering magazines, and individuals or organizations interested in volunteering or making a donation.
While food banks feed the hungry, MagLiteracy feeds the mind.
“There are so many stories of how that one book, that one comic or that one magazine opened up someone’s eyes to a whole new world,” said John Mennell, founder and chairman of MagLiteracy. “We’re not just sharing stories; we’re creating them.”
MagLiteracy delivers new and recycled magazines at no cost to at-risk readers in food pantries, shelters, senior centers and other organizations in need of reading material. For instance, a trove of cooking magazines was delivered to a shelter and culinary job training program for trafficked women in Columbus, Ohio. With help from those magazines, the women are now learning culinary skills and some basics like math.
“Illiteracy is a root cause of poverty and hunger,” Mennell said. “And when we say poverty, we’re also referring to poverty of the mind, poverty of the heart. In the same way Kroger supplies food banks with surplus food, we’re able to give a new life to reading materials supplied to us by our partners.”
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that as of 2019, one in five U.S. adults — about 43 million people — possess low literacy skills, defined as the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, achieve one’s goals and develop one’s knowledge and potential. Two-thirds of U.S. children in poverty live in homes with zero books. So, MagLiteracy set out to share the reading materials that we all love to feed children and families hungry to read.
For more information, please visit MagLiteracy.org.
