Girls Write Now is a nonprofit organization that pairs underserved young women and gender-nonconforming youth with professional writers as lifelong mentors and role models. We first began working with Girls Write Now in 2017 to produce their annual anthology, which features the voices of the program’s mentees in print. Today, we continue to work with Girls Write Now on a variety of additional initiatives to help foster the professional growth of the program’s mentees, including employee engagement workshops around editing, a partnership to source candidates and get priority referrals for our internship program, and the enlistment of our authors as keynote speakers in the Girls Write Now Live reading series at the New-York Historical Society. To learn more about Girls Write Now, click here. To learn more about the Girls Write Now anthologies and the Agents of Change Award, click here and here.
Regions: U.S.
Amplifying Diversity in Classrooms
We have been listening to educator feedback that developing empathy and respect is a priority in increasingly multicultural classrooms. With this information in mind, together with one of our children’s publishing divisions, Random House Children’s Books, we partnered with First Book on a campaign that centered on the essential themes of diversity, acceptance, and inclusion in its back-to-school efforts in 2019, donating 15,000 copies of a First Book–exclusive, affordable paperback edition of All Are Welcome, written by Alexandra Penfold and illustrated by Suzanne Kaufman. The book features a school with children of different ethnicities, religions, and abilities and from different family structures playing side by side. To learn more about this campaign, click here.
Books for Special Olympics Youth Athletes
In 2019, we partnered with Special Olympics and the American Library Association to participate in a pilot program to support Special Olympics Young Athletes (SOYA). SOYA is a sport and play program for children aged 2 to 7 with and without intellectual disabilities, where kids learn sports, such as running and throwing, as well as social skills, such as sharing, being team players, and following instructions. SOYA also helps support families, teachers, and caregivers in order to bring inclusive learning and play to communities across the country. To help continue this engagement at home, we donated 500 copies of R. J. Palacio’s We’re All Wonders and 500 copies of Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches, which were included in special Young Athletes backpacks at participating libraries. To learn more, click here.
Creative Writing Awards for Students
One of our signature programs to identify and celebrate emerging writers since 1993, the Creative Writing Awards is part of our ongoing commitment to promote diverse voices and stories. Creative Writing Award winners have gone on to become professional and award-winning writers. In 2019, we partnered with We Need Diverse Books to expand the scholarship program nationally and award high school seniors with $10,000 college scholarships for their winning entries. The winners met with author Natasha Díaz, editors, and other publishing professionals before reading their work at an awards ceremony at our headquarters in New York City. To learn more about the program and our recent winners, click here.
Committed Allyship with Our LGBTQIA+ Community
The Penguin Random House LGBTQ+ Network was created in 2013 and aspires to create community among the LGBTQIA+ individuals at Penguin Random House by providing a supportive environment to all employees who share the common idea of nurturing workplace diversity, creating a forum for professional and social opportunities, and aiming to increase awareness of LGBTQIA+ issues, authors, and books.
DREAMing Out Loud Workshops
In May 2019, we hosted students from across several campuses of the City University of New York (CUNY) as part of PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud, a program aimed at students of diverse immigration statuses enrolled at CUNY schools. In collaboration with PEN America and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, we hosted a daylong seminar on the publishing industry at our headquarters in New York City. The career symposium featured panel events with professionals from Penguin Random House and provided participants with one-on-one editorial mentoring from professional writers. Keynote speaker Reshma Saujani, author of the international bestseller Brave, Not Perfect and founder of Girls Who Code, discussed her career as an activist and offered inspirational messages from her latest book. To read more about the seminar, click here.
One Million Books Donated in the Obama Family’s Name
We are proud to have donated one million of our children’s books in the Obama family’s name to First Book, our longtime partner dedicated to providing books to programs and schools in low-income communities. Plans for the one-million-book donation were originally announced in 2017 when Penguin Random House acquired world publication rights to publish books by President and Mrs. Obama. In 2019, in celebration of Giving Tuesday and our publishing partnership with the Obamas, we increased our giving with an additional donation to First Book. The special Hope Love Give campaign paid homage to the themes of hope, love, and generosity in the beloved Penguin children’s classic Corduroy, and we matched donations from Giving Tuesday to the end of the year, altogether donating an additional 300,000 children’s books while inviting readers to participate in helping us fulfill the book wishes of underprivileged kids across the country. To learn more, click here and here.