This year on Sant Jordi Day, we donated more than 4,000 books to hospitals, hotels, and support centers housing healthcare workers fighting COVID-19. At the time, Spain was facing its highest peak of infections of deaths due to COVID-19, and this donation aimed to help pass the time for those in isolation and to express our gratitude to the medical teams for their bravery and hard work.
Commitments: Free Expression & Joy of Reading
PEN America partnership/supporter
Donating Books to Communities in Need at a Time of Crisis
We distributed free books to some of the communities most affected by the COVID-19 crisis, including families on low incomes and senior citizens facing isolation. By getting thousands of books into the hands of people who face particular hardship or distress during this challenging time, our aim was to provide mental stimulation, company, and comfort at a time when people need the power of books more than ever. We distributed books through a partnership with the community platform Neighbourly, which supports a national network of food banks and community causes that deliver food parcels to people’s homes, as well as grassroots groups that support senior citizens. To learn more about how we teamed up with Neighbourly to offer relief and escapism in challenging times, click here.
1,000,000+ Children’s Books Donated on behalf of the Obama’s
Indies with Impact Bookstore Grants
Together with the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), in 2019 we announced a new grant opportunity for independent bookstores. Indies with Impact honored two bookstores that work in tandem with a community nonprofit or organization of their choice in a program that strengthens their local communities and encourages a passion for reading. We launched this grant to recognize, support, and strengthen the already robust connections bookstores have with their communities. To learn more, click here. To learn more about our 2019 winner, click here.
$20,000 in Grants to Promote Reading
To celebrate Puffin’s 80th anniversary, we awarded $20,000 in grants to local booksellers who are passionate about encouraging young readers in their community. We received an incredible range of entries with proposed initiatives and programs that showed a clear commitment to improve children’s literacy within local communities. Four booksellers were awarded $5,000 each to implement their proposals, which ranged from encouraging teenage parents to read, to supporting struggling readers, to making books accessible to kids in rural communities and homes without books. To learn more about our winning booksellers, click here.
Supporting Local Booksellers with #SaveIndieBookstores
We are committed to supporting bookstores as special places that provide a source of comfort, information, and imagination to their local communities. As ever, we strive to be the best partner, now and in the future, for our bookselling community, and we remain supportive of those retail partners who have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 crisis.
In response to COVID-19, we expanded our support with a new initiative to donate 30% of book purchases made on our website to the #SaveIndieBookstores campaign of our long-standing partner, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc). This initiative directly benefited booksellers who urgently needed financial help with medical bills, household expenses, and other essentials.
Penguin Random House Teacher Awards for Literacy
In support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in recognition of the urgent need to recruit and empower educators of color, together with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), we reimagined our annual Teacher Awards program for 2020, which we began cosponsoring and administering in 2019.
This year, in lieu of distributing grants for its two competitions, the National Teacher Award for Lifelong Readers and the Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry, we made a $25,000 joint donation on behalf of both award programs to the Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award Program (EC-EOC), which supports early-career teachers of color as they build accomplished teaching careers in literacy education.
Built upon the Penguin Random House Teacher Awards for Literacy, which began in 2012 and has awarded more than $180,000 in teacher grants to date, this NCTE partnership awards two separate and distinct grant awards of $10,000 each: The National Teacher Award for Lifelong Readers honors a teacher who inspires their students to read all genres of writing, and the Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry recognizes a teacher who inspires their students to love poetry.
Our partnership with the NCTE recognizes the nation’s most dynamic and resourceful teachers who creatively inspire and instill a lifelong love of reading and poetry in students. The National Teacher Award for Lifelong Readers and the Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry honor teachers’ recognizes and supports educators doing innovative literacy work within their schools and local communities. The awards are open to full- and part-time teachers in public schools, and winners are awarded both cash grants and book donations. To learn more about the awards and our recent winners, click here.
Enriching School Library Collections
We are offering free reading programs to the Dunhuang Dongjie Primary School in the Gansu Province. A workshop and twenty-five copies of Dunhuang are included in the program, and, we donated 50 copies of original Penguin Random House titles to enrich the school’s library collections.
Supporting Cancer Research with Read for the Cure
Penguin Random House Canada is the founding presenting partner of the national Read for the Cure event series, which recently announced that nearly $100,000 was raised at events in 2019. This is money that goes directly to funding entire projects through the Cancer Research Society. Since 2006, this annual event series has raised more than $1.6 million for cancer research. Employees volunteer at events, and Penguin Random House Canada authors take part in each event. Authors who have participated in past include Margaret Atwood, Vincent Lam, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Linden MacIntyre, Carol Off, Michael Redhill, Catherine Gildiner, Lisa Wingate, Rebecca Makkai, and Miriam Toews.