TORONTO (2020)
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.
TORONTO (2020)
After the Toronto Public Library’s branches were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of locations were repurposed to serve as pop-up food banks. We joined forces with the Toronto Public Library Foundation to help add kids’ books to the food hampers being distributed there for young readers who are without Internet or library access while schools and branches remain closed, as well as donated books for distribution to families in shelters. In total, we donated 2,000 books for young readers as part of a matching campaign that saw us pledge 500 books for every 500 books the Foundation purchased using donations from members of the public.
ONTARIO (2020)
In honor of National Nursing Week in May and the World Health Organization’s designation of 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse, we joined forces with Registered Practical Nurses Association of Ontario (WeRPN) to send a message of thanks to nurses in our home province for their heroic work on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis caring for the sick and vulnerable and protecting the health of our communities. Working together with beloved Canadian author Margaret Atwood, we contributed copies of her recent novel, The Testaments, to be included in care packages that went out to WeRPN’s more than 13,000 members, which also contained gifts of tea, treats, and lotion from other major brand partners. To learn more about our recognition of nurses, click here.
CANADA (2020)
In 2020, we continued our long-standing partnership with First Book Canada with a special focus on getting books to families, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We donated more than 5,000 books to newcomer, refugee, and Indigenous families across Canada in support of national not-for-profit consortium Mothers Matter Centre’s sixth Adopt-a-Reader campaign, which challenged parents to read with their kids for 15 minutes a day for 15 days and logged nearly 9,000 hours of family reading time this year. When the pandemic struck, we worked with First Book Canada to deliver workbooks to families in Scarborough, Toronto, to help kids starting home-schooling, and have signed on to our partner’s campaign to get one million books to low-income families without home libraries or Internet access while schools and local libraries are closed due to COVID-19. To learn more about First Book Canada’s one-million-book campaign, click here.
U.S. (2020)
Nurturing curiosity and supporting causes is a top priority for DK colleagues, and the U.S. team has made several book donations to organizations that promote literacy and serve a crucial role during the COVID-19 outbreak. We donated 2,000 books to First Book to support children affected by U.S. school closures, and gave 300 books to Bess the Book Bus, a Florida-based mobile literacy outreach, to be distributed across the country. Having recently visited the Lower East Side Girls Club, which helps girls and young women on the Lower East Side of New York City, we provided books to be included in care packages for members who may have lost their safe spaces because of the pandemic.
DK also supported two nonprofits in California. To encourage science education, we donated STEM-related titles to Community Resources for Science, which serves schools in low-income communities, and donated more than 500 books to Project Books and Blankies, which provides books to shelters, literacy and after-school programs, classrooms, libraries, and more.
Beginning in 2018, Penguin Random House U.S. started shifting to LED lighting and is now saving more than 2.75 megawatt hours annually, including:
We have been partnering with the Story Factory since it opened in 2011. A not-for-profit creative writing center for marginalized young people aged 7 to 17, the Story Factory hosts a comprehensive program of workshops that helps build literacy, confidence, and creativity. We have helped publish various anthologies and collections over the years, and our employees volunteer to help edit, design, and typeset the novellas and poetry chapbooks that emerge from the Story Factory’s yearlong programs. In 2020, we were delighted to publish The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham, a graduate of the program. To learn more about the Story Factory, click here. To learn more about our partnership, click here and here.
GERMANY (2020)
We published a collection of works about life in the time of COVID-19 with the “Corona und wir” (Corona and us) anthology. The contributions from the various renowned authors provide food for thought and moments of reflection on what we collectively felt and dealt with in the early months of the pandemic. The proceeds from the anthology will go to Sozialwerk des Deutschen Buchhandels e.V. The charity offers help to bookstores in need and promotes further education for young booksellers.
For many years, we have been committed to promoting reading with Stiftung Lesen, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making reading a part of every child’s life. Since 1997, every year on World Book Day, together with Stiftung Lesen, we have published a new title in the book series “Ich schenk dir eine Geschichte” (I Give You a Story) as part of a nationwide book voucher campaign to promote reading. More than 3,500 bookstores regularly take part in the campaign and give this special book as a gift to over one million schoolchildren, making it the largest reading promotion campaign in Germany. To learn more, click here.
GERMANY (2020)
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.
