Years: 2019

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.

Internships for Afro-Australian Students

In 2019, we successfully introduced a new approach to internships in order to provide underrepresented groups better opportunities to explore the publishing industry and consider publishing as a possible career path. We partnered with the Afro-Australian Student Organisation in Victoria and New South Wales—a group that provides opportunities that improve the academic, professional, and personal development of African and African Australian students in Australia—to seek candidates for our paid internship program. Successful candidates have the opportunity to gain a broad understanding of publishing, spending 120 hours rotating through different departments and learning how a book goes to publication and beyond.

DK’s Sustainability Working Party

DK’s global Sustainability Working Party was created to deliver plans on sustainability as volunteers from our offices around the world meet monthly to create and execute our global strategy. The meetings also act as a forum to discuss ideas that will drive forward sustainability initiatives. We also have local colleague-led Green committees dedicated to encouraging sustainable behaviors among colleagues, including reducing printing and single-use plastic. These committees also participate in local and global events throughout the year to raise awareness about environmental causes, such as Earth Day and World Environment Day.

Response to Australian Bushfire Crisis

In late 2019 and early 2020, Australia was ravaged by the worst bushfires ever experienced in the country. Across four states, lives and livelihoods were lost, homes destroyed, and our wildlife and their natural habitats critically impacted. PRH Australia, with the support of PRH Canada and PRH U.S., raised $75,000 through fundraising events across all sites, and that money was subsequently distributed to Australia Red Cross and wildlife rescue organizations in the most severely impacted states of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

Conversion to Renewable Energy Credits

We successfully made the transition to purchasing Renewable Energy Credits at our distribution center in Westminster, Maryland, offsetting 100% of its electrical usage and making it possible to support clean energy. Both of our warehouses in the United States now purchase wind credits to offset 100% of their power. Our offices in the United Kingdom also completed their transition to renewable energy in October 2018, and our New York City headquarters is on track to reach 100% wind energy credits by the end of 2020.

Reduction of Packaging Waste

We have been making conscious efforts to reduce our packing materials. In our Returns department, we’ve programmed our shipping machine to create custom-sized cartons for returned books that need to be put back in inventory. This machine creates shipping cartons in the exact sizes required to hold the books, which means that we use less corrugate and no plastic bubble packing material to fill in empty spaces. If needed, we use our “ravioli” packaging to create filler, which is 100% curbside recyclable. In general, this machine has helped us greatly reduce our packaging waste.

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.