Together with We Need Diverse Books (WNDB), we launched the Black Creatives Fund in February 2021, an initiative with a mission of supporting emerging and established Black writers and illustrators. Penguin Random House is the inaugural sponsor of the fund for the 2021 year. 

The Black Creatives Fund will feature three initiatives in 2021, including a Revisions Workshop, a mentorship program, and a marketing symposia in partnership with the Brown Bookshelf. The Fund will launch with the six-month Revisions Workshop that will support unpublished Black writers with completed manuscripts and feature esteemed faculty including our authors Nic Stone and Jewell Parker Rhodes.

Twelve writers selected for the workshop will have the opportunity to receive guidance throughout the revision process and submit their manuscript to editors at Penguin Random House for possible publication. All 12 writers will be awarded stipends. Two finalists will receive larger grants, and publishing deals for top performers will be strongly considered. 

As longtime partners of WNDB, we are honored to collaborate with them to build this important new pipeline for discovering and elevating Black voices. The Black Creatives Fund is an integral piece of Amplify Black Stories, our year-long campaign to celebrate Black authors and introduce their stories to a diverse group of readers. For more information, please visit the Black Creatives Fund program page.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we donated 100 children’s books All About Kids, a Toronto daycare center, so that they could safely provide reading material for the children of essential workers in their care—enough to make sure that the kids would still have something to read while used books were thoroughly sanitized before returning to the rotation.

In 2020, we are committed to stepping up our climate protection activities and annually increase our climate-neutral book production by 20 percent. Our Munich headquarters has been climate-neutral since 2019; we have reduced our emissions where possible and offset all unavoidable emissions. By the end of 2020, the entirety of book production at all our children’s publishers will be climate-neutral, and our other group publishers will be producing more and more titles in climate-neutral ways, helping us achieve our goal of a 20 percent annual increase in climate-neutral book production across our publishers.