I’m Alena Shafer, an accountant at EY and a longtime volunteer at Page Ahead. My Company, EY, partners with Page Ahead each year to hand out new books and read them to the kids. I want to ensure Page Ahead can give more books to amazing kids. Page Ahead’s mission means something personal to me.
My mom was a single parent. When I was growing up, I was on the free lunch program at school, and we would frequent food banks. Christmas gifts often came from one of those sponsor-a-family programs. I moved 8 times and went to 10 different schools when I was in elementary, half of those were before I reached the 3rd grade.
I was looking through my old school things and I stumbled upon a journal I kept when I was in third grade. Here’s one of the entries from the summer after third grade:
Well, I didn’t turn out to be a teacher – although I do volunteer in the schools Page Ahead serves. Not much of an artist either. But I do have two kids, and I do have that house with the big yard and an upstairs! So really, I think I did pretty well by my 3rd grade self.
Here is another one is from October 1992:
Later, my entries became more verbose, like this one from May 1993:
Frankly, that still sounds like an ultimate summer!
Books can broaden the imagination. They can take you places you can’t go on your own. They can also bring you back to places you have been. I found a book, The Borrowers, my Grandma’s friend gave me about the same time as these journal entries. She put an inscription in the front which read:
As I read that I remembered that summer, fishing in one of the thousand Minnesota lakes, shopping, and reading on the dock.
I attribute being a good reader to the foundational reading I was able to build through the third grade. A lot of this was because my mom was amazing and resourceful.
She would take me to our library after school and on the weekends so I always had books to read. They weren’t my very own books, but I loved them.
You know, many libraries in our state are only open during “normal business hours” and are closed on the weekends. And many school libraries, especially ones that are in low-income neighborhoods, aren’t able to let kids take books home. They can’t afford to replace the books if they don’t come back. This is where Page Ahead comes in – providing at-home libraries for kids. So those kids can pick out their favorite book, sit on their couch, and read it.
You should see how excited the kids get when they get to choose their Page Ahead books. Some of them just can’t believe that they get to keep them! I can tell you, if Page Ahead had been around when I was in school – getting 12 books each year would have gotten top billing in MY journal. Forget going to Florida. Being able to pick all those books to take home and keep would have been like winning the Lotto to me.
We have the power to give that to another child. Today.
Page Ahead is on its way to getting home libraries for every eligible kid in Washington. Every child deserves books of their own and YOU are in the position to make that happen today.
Thank you!
Bonus - here is a pic of my mom and me...