All Readers Welcome: Supporting School Libraries

October 23, 2024 Golden Libraries RESOURCES Comments Off

From an email:

About the Program

One of the Impact and Legacy Fund’s (ILF) flagship programs is All Readers Welcome: Supporting School Libraries. Every quarter, the ILF provides three underfunded schools with collections of books that school librarians may not be able to purchase using school funds. All of the books selected from the curated list tell the stories of communities and identities that have historically been underrepresented in children’s literature—and in the classroom.

Recent selections include:

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sanchez
Maizy Chen’s Last Chance by Lisa Yee
When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller
All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson
Ironhead, Or, Once a Young Lady by Jean-Claude Van Rijckeghem and Kristen Gehrman
The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera
Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay
Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri
And many more

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter: A Time magazine pick for Best YA of All Time

L. Sánchez, Erika (Author)
English (Publication Language)
368 Pages – 03/03/2022 (Publication Date) – Rock the Boat (Publisher)

Founded by ILF steering committee member and author Federico Erebia—and administered in partnership with Bookelicious—this literacy-building program has brought over 800 current books into 27 school libraries, reaching over 25,000 students across the United States. The ILF steering committee carefully selects each recipient based on their application which must demonstrate that their school library has a clear need for more diverse books—and a lack of funding to purchase those titles on their own. Once selected, school librarians choose their new collections from a wide range of books.

With All Readers Welcome, we’ve stocked shelves in the following U.S. states:

Arizona
Colorado
Indiana
Massachusetts
New Mexico
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Ohio
Texas
Utah
Virginia
Washington

Apply for All Readers Welcome

If you are a school librarian (or teacher in a school with no library), apply for All Readers Welcome via this Google form.

While our current group of selected schools is diverse, we prioritize schools that:

Have a significant (20-100%) portion of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch
Are in states with restrictions on which books librarians can or cannot purchase using school budgets
Serve a diverse student population, including bilingual classrooms
Experience book loss
Receive Title 1 Federal funding

If your school doesn’t meet any of these criteria, but you still feel there’s a strong need for diverse books in your collection, please apply anyway. We are always looking to support more kinds of school libraries. For more information about past recipients, please visit this webpage.