Update 6/10/2025:

Bocce for Books is a wrap! Thanks to all who came to Campo di Bocce to support BooksPlus on 4/27/2025. We also want to thank our Rotarian and non-Rotarian volunteers who set up, tore down, managed check-in, and helped with check out. Special shout out to Marge Sentous-Gehl for donating all the desserts!

The Bocce play was unexpectedly competitive! ...measuring tapes? 😆 The winners won some nice tokens of appreciation. The dinner was tasty and generously apportioned by our host, and there was joyful communing all about.

We're finalizing the numbers now and will report back soon! I'll start issuing thank you tax letters once all the math is complete.

We will keep the donation portal open through mid-June.

Update 4/19/2025:

We're almost there! Remember, every kilobuck, even above our goal, helps us advance our cause, especially the need to buy a storage shed. You have until EOB Monday 4/21 to buy tickets. We have amazing auction items including stays in fancy digs in Midtown Manhattan next to Carnegie Hall, a lovely large home in a beach resort in Costa Rica, the opportunity to play golf at CordeValle, beautiful jewelry, cool gift baskets, a basketball signed by legendary women's hoops coach Tara VanDerveer, several opportunities to win tickets to sporting events, and more!

Update 4/17/2025:

Good news! We delivered our headcount to the food vendor and they informed us that we can still add more guests if we let them know soon. So PLEASE help us sell out our modest event. And if you can't make it, we would TRULY appreciate a donation to BooksPlus.

Update 4/12/2025:

Just a quick reminder on our campaign timeline:

Please buy your tickets by EOB 4/17/2025 so we may deliver headcount to our event host.
We will keep the donation window open until EOB 4/30/2025.

Update 4/11/2025:

Hi Everyone! Due to your overwhelming response, we've decided to increase our goal to $10,000. As this was our very first outreach for support, our original goal aimed to ask for just enough funds to maintain our current service to our local youth. We were shy about dreaming bigger! Your additional help will make these wishes come true! Here is a sampling of the expanded output we can create with your help:

Our LitKit program scaled up way beyond our original expectations, so to serve the need, we cut back each tote's contents. If we get an extra $1000, we can get the content back up to snuff this year.
Every extra kilobuck will move us towards being able to buy a weatherproof 10x10 shed plus interior shelving to store a larger number of books and book cubby wood. More storage capacity allows us to make large bulk orders, which lowers per unit costs SUBSTANTIALLY!
An extra $1000 funds our efforts to automate the outreach to families with newborns and the process for registering 0-5 year old kids into the Dolly Parton Imagination Library.
Now, for a REALLY big stretch goal: In the spirit of the "wrap-around" mission we have for instilling literacy in the youngest kids, please help fund our ability to host them and their parents on field trips to libraries, museums, and local children's theater. These venues are visual feasts for the preschoolers and they familiarize the families with affordable outings built around literacy. Many of our kids are attendees at Title 1 schools, so they would be hosted at subsidized fees or even at no charge, but we'd need funds to support the rest of what it takes to host a field trip (orientation sessions, parent tickets, transportation, food, etc.). We estimate that $500 will fund one field trip to a library for 25 kids each with one parent, plus a teacher.

We at BooksPlus will be forever grateful to you all for any additional support you can offer.

Update 4/9/2025:

We wish to honor our dear recently departed teammate, Peter Thurston, who was a source of inspiration, leadership, and friendship as we launched BooksPlus. Peter was also our book cubby building instructor, so his impact was material to our endeavor. We at BooksPlus also want to send our condolences to Peter's family and friends. He was an amazing gentleman in every sense of the word.

We love and miss you, Peter!

Our Original Storyline for this Campaign:

Join the BooksPlus Committee of the Rotary Club of Los Altos at the Bocce for Books fundraiser. Invite your friends and family. You will not only have a great time, but you will support our projects, which endeavor to ensure that every child is prepared to learn as they enter Kindergarten.

The BooksPlus committee aims to close the literacy gap for underserved children, birth to Pre-Kindergarten, in our local communities. Research confirms that a child's brain achieves 80-90% of its development by age 5. For this reason, BooksPlus has a laser focus on this youngest age group.

Studies also show that books are necessary but insufficient to achieve our mission. Accordingly, we integrate parents, siblings, caregivers, teachers, librarians, and other role models, into our programs so the child's developmental ecosystem understands how important it is to read to children from the start. Our mission is to enable and foster a culture of reading and listening around the child in both their home and school life.

We seek your financial support so we may continue our mission where:

We introduce children to quality books so they learn to enjoy reading, gain knowledge, and "see " themselves in great stories. These books encourage the enrichment of a child's multilinguality*. We have expanded our language offering from English and Spanish to include Mandarin, Russian, and other languages. And in collaboration with another club, we have just started to expand our offerings to include books for and about neurodivergent kids.
We conduct our flagship Family Workshops for preschoolers and their families where we provide book cubbies (small book cases) to each child, which they decorate with paint, their name and favorite subjects decorations. We engage the kids and their families with the local public Librarian who educates them about the Library's available services; parents also have the opportunity to register for library cards. The children enjoy activity circles, an interactive read-aloud, and then they get to select three books of their choice. They take their cubby and books home, proud of their work. The cubby becomes part of the family home, often remaining the one space in the home that the child can call their own.
We deliver literary kits, or LitKits (decorated totes of books and early reading games) to preschoolers in temporary housing or through the Community Service Agency and other service providers.
We partner with Linden Tree Books to gift books to school libraries in honor of and signed by our club's weekly guest speakers.
In a newly developing project, we will eventually work with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library (https://imaginationlibrary.com) who will deliver free books each month to Santa Clara County children ages 0-5.

The BooksPlus committee envisions a time when there is no correlation between a child’s socio-economic status and their love of reading. We believe thriving readers are best positioned to do well in school.

So come have fun and support BooksPlus. Play Ball!

Questions? Contact Jeanine Valadez at j9valadez@earthlink.net, or Liz Nyberg at liznyberg26@gmail.com

A Note about Multilinguality: We have no intent to convert* a child from their home language to English. It is our goal to enrich the child's competence in both their home language and English. In fact, we encourage kids and families to explore understanding and speaking more than 2 languages, a common cultural goal around the world. Multilinguality is a marketable skill that will enhance all our children's and their children's lives in an increasingly global economy. The age Birth to 5 is exactly when multilinguality can become inherent in the child.

Local Librarian conducts an interactive Read-Aloud at a Family Workshop Rotarians build cubbies in prep for the Family Workshop

Left/Top: A Public Librarian conducts a reading circle. Right/Bottom: Rotarians and, often, friends and family, build cubbies and (not shown) decorate LitKit tote bags with iron-on transfers.

Bocce for Books Fundraiser

Support BooksPlus projects and build a community of readers.