Join us in supporting a literacy charity this Christmas
When considering Christmas promotions recently, we were inspired by the B1G1 – Business for Good initiative. – it seems like the perfect time of year to be grateful for what we have – such as the education, resources and freedom to express ourselves through writing.
So instead of offering a Christmas discount, we’ve decided support the charity Room to Read, which promotes literacy and gender equality in children in low-income communities.
We pledge to donate at least 25% of all revenue (that’s revenue, not profits) earned from Novel Factory Online during December.
Please consider donating as well – even if it’s only a few pounds or dollars. They currently have a donation matching scheme in place – so now is the perfect time!
If you’d like to donate somewhere, but that’s not the charity for you, here are some literary and book related alternatives:
If you know of a local or national literacy related charity that you would like us to add to the list, please just tell us in the comments below, or email us, and we’d be happy to. We’d particularly love to add more charities from different countries to this list.
UPDATE – We’ve also donated £100 to an initiative run by Knights Of to open popup and permanent bookshops in the UK which feature only books with black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) protagonists.
“They decided to open their #ReadTheOnePercent shop in response to a damning report from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), which found that of more than 9,000 children’s books published in the UK in 2017, just 1% had a BAME main character.”
“The CLPE report prompted the pair to celebrate Knights Of’s first birthday with the pop-up in Brixton, south London. They put £2,000 into it, repainted the shop inside and out, and had people “knocking on the window to get in before we had unpacked any books”. They sold out of their stock in two days and had to reorder.”
“The current version of the shop stocks books that are “more representative of class, gender and disability, less race-specific,” says Stevens. “The first time round it was just to make noise about the report, this time it is inclusion across culture.” It’s still, he admits, hard to find a wide range of titles to stock, and they have delved into backlists, into the stock of tiny publishers and even into self-published books.”
Read the full article in the Guardian
Representation in fiction is so important to how we view ourselves and the world and people around us, so when we saw the Twitter campaign with Penguin Random House offering to match donations up to £15,000, we knew we wanted to contribute.
Please consider contributing too! https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/readtheonepercent