Happy Christmas and Hanukkah week! Below we present to you the inspiring story and photos from Carina Tovar, a former Reading to Kids student and now a volunteer! It is a beautiful reminder of the impact we’ve made since 1999. Click on any image to see it full size:

     

It's the final six days of our 2024 Annual Fund Drive, and we need your help to reach our goals before the end of the year!

Thanks to those generous volunteer readers and the Facebook fundraisers created by volunteers Matthew Jones, Mark May, and Jessica Chong, we have now raised $51,288 overall from 347 donors!

This puts us closer to our goal of raising $65,000 from 500 donors within the next week!

Here's how you can help us meet our $65,000 goal before our fund drive ends on the 31st:

1) Make a pledge to donate by check or donate online today by visiting our 2024 Annual Fund Drive. Contributions of any amount are greatly appreciated!

2) Show your support by asking friends and family to contribute! Visit our 2024 Annual Fund Drive page and look under the "Help us Fundraise!" header for resources, including information on creating your own personalized fundraising page on Facebook, our handy donor sheet for raising money with your friends and co-workers, tips for fundraising, and so much more.

Once they know about Reading to Kids, many of your friends and family will want to donate - we just need you to ask!

Our "Mysteries & New Adventures" reading clubs on January 11th are only two weeks away, and we need 143 more volunteers.

You can help by joining our January 11th reading club event so your friends will see that on your wall. Then go to our website and sign up with us.

Please tweet, post to Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram, and message your friends that we still need more volunteers.

You can also print out this flyer and post it at your work, school, church, synagogue, mosque, or favorite community bulletin board.

We need more of our experienced volunteers to help train new and returning volunteers, be a GLC, or especially be a second or third Site Coordinator at any of our schools.

If you can help in any of those roles, please visit our home page at www.readingtokids.org and submit your email address in the yellow box, as usual!

Then, e-mail us at info@readingtokids.org to tell us the above role you would like to take on to help create wonderful reading clubs!

At our January reading clubs we would love to give away a computer or iPad/tablet to one lucky kid at each school.

If you or your employer have any working computers that are less than 6 years old running Windows 10 or later, or any Macintosh computers less than 7 years old, or any iPads or similar tablets, we can give them to deserving kids!

We especially need working computers (CPUs), whether or not they come with monitors, keyboards, etc. Please email us at info@readingtokids.org to help make a kid very happy!

A Charles White Elementary 5th grader with perfect Reading to Kids attendance
leaps for joy after winning a new iPad

Thanks, and we hope you can join us for our January 11th reading clubs!