NEW YORK, NY (2021)
An important part of our mission is to ensure that every child has access to reading. We are proud to support the Starlight Children’s Foundation Book Mobile Program, which offers pediatric patients at local hospitals the chance to explore fictional worlds through books, for the past nine years. The program provides a necessary pastime for severely children throughout their hospital stays.
We initially supplied book mobile carts to The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx, Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, New York Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Manhattan and Harlem Hospital in Manhattan. We bolstered our support for the program by supplying book mobile carts to Richmond University Medical Center in Staten Island, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, and the Brooklyn Hospital Center in Brooklyn; now impacting all five New York City buroughs. The carts are replenished annually with Penguin Random House children’s books.
U.S. (2021)
For the third year in a row, we partnered with the Kellogg Company to bring the Feeding Reading Program to students nationwide. The program was facilitated by our Special Markets team. Their partnership with Kellogg’s Feeding Reading program allowed anyone who buys participating products to earn credits for a free Penguin Random House book. With 125 diverse books to choose from in the program, participants had the opportunity to redeem up to 6 books.
The creative packaging included classic Penguin Random House literary characters such as the Berenstain Bears, Corduroy and The Very Hungry Caterpillar were featured on more than 100,000,000 Kellogg’s products.
U.S. (2021)
We believe the right to freedom of expression and the protection of writers against censorship and unjust persecution are indispensable to the development of society and culture. In honor of Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and highlighting the value of free and open access to information, we partnered with the American Bookseller Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) to celebrate the theme of the week “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
From the week of September 26 – October 2, we donated $15,000 to ABFEE. Penguin Random House stands with ABOFF’s mission of promoting and protecting the free exchange of ideas. The organization issues statements on significant free expression controversies, participates in legal cases involving First Amendment rights, collaborates with other groups with an interest in free speech, and provides education about the importance of free expression to booksellers, politicians, the press and the public.
U.S. (2021)
We came together with longstanding partner Save the Children to bring their annual 100 Days of Reading to 10 US cities. The tour kicked off in San Francisco to bring summer learning, fun activities, and essential resources that helped kids need to prepare for the school year.To support the program, we donated 50,000 children’s books in addition to providing content for their online library.
Stops included Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte and Stanley, NC, Bay City, MI, Racine, WI, Chicago, and Boston.
U.S. (2021)
For Giving Tuesday in 2021, we partnered with our longtime friends at First Book to give the gift of reading by supporting the “Give a Million” campaign through providing a 200,000 book donation to First Book toward their million-book effort. This Giving Tuesday initiative helps support our shared values and mission to foster a universal passion for reading.
U.S. (2021)
Penguin Classics has partnered with #DisruptTexts, a renowned education organization that works to create a more inclusive, representative and equitable language arts curriculum for K-12 students. Facilitated by Penguin Random House (PRH) Education, this partnership includes a number of new initiatives focused on connecting with, and supporting, educators through innovative programming; online events for vital dialogue and teacher community discussion; and new educator resources for guiding student reading and discussion of traditional and “new” classics in-and-out of the classroom.
Initiatives and resources include: original educator guides authored by the #DisruptTexts team, to be made available as free, downloadable educator resources on PRHSecondaryED.com; a virtual educator event to be hosted by the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE); an online discussion panel to be hosted by publisher Penguin Classics featuring Min Jin Lee, author of the novel Pachinko; and a number of other collaborative programming and resource-based initiatives in development. Each of these initiatives will revolve around the essential question “what is a classic?” in order to broaden the scope of which texts are considered traditional literary canon.
The aforementioned educator guides will be for four Penguin Classics texts that have been overlooked in secondary classrooms that are representative of BIPOC communities, including: Passing by Nella Larsen; Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en; Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko; and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature edited by Dohra Ahmad.
U.S. (2021)
We partnered with the Authors Guild Foundation to host Virtual Business Bootcamps for Writers at no charge to participants due in part to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Penguin Random House, and other generous donors. The Business Bootcamps for Writers launched in 2018 as a free, in-person one-day intensive program across various locations around the country, targeting communities without such programming or connections to the publishing industry. With the pandemic, the Business Bootcamps for Writers program was reimagined as a series of webinars presented over several months. By offering the curriculum online, a greater number of writers who wish to participate are reachable no matter where they live.
The Bootcamps for Writers is a series of free webinars for early and mid-career authors that provides them with the relevant tools and resources to manage their careers and successfully navigate the publishing marketplace. he curriculum educates authors about just what it takes to create, publish, and market books in an increasingly competitive climate, including a deep dive focusing on earning a sustainable living as an author.
U.S. (2021)
In honor of the global publication of RENEGADES: Born in the USA, a collection of conversations between Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, and legendary musician Bruce Springsteen, we made a financial donation to the Obama Foundation’s youth leadership programs, expanding upon our earlier donation of one million children’s books to First Book in the Obama family name. A portion of President Obama’s proceeds from RENEGADES will benefit youth leadership programs at the Obama Foundation.
We partnered with The Association for Rural and Small Libraries to launch a rolling grant program to recognize rural, small and tribal libraries that support underserved communities in the U.S. and U.S. territories. The program will award grants of up to $2,500 to libraries that demonstrate a true need. Penguin Random House and ARSL have worked together to ensure the application process is simple and straightforward to remove as many barriers to applying for a grant as possible. Grants are not limited to literacy and may be used for everything from library programming and books to resources like hotspots that help community members access important information. In-kind donations will also be considered.
CAMBRIDGE, MA (2021)
As a part of our commitment to amplifying diverse voices, we sponsored Voices for Justice, a free virtual speaker series that supports diversity, equity and inclusion work at the Cambridge Public Library, in 2021.
The virtual events featured Random House author Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste) and One World author Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer).
Voices for Justice funds diversity, equity and inclusion activities at the Cambridge Public Library, including public programming and workshops, professional development for Library staff, and the creation of “Little Free Libraries” filled with free books that reflect diverse authors and experiences.
