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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. 

In celebration of National Family Literacy Month this November, we teamed up with online retailer zulily to provide books to children in need across the U.S. As part of zulily’s sixth annual holiday giving “Books for Kids Buy 1, Give 1” campaign, each Penguin Random House book purchased will trigger a donation – up to 75,000 books – to longtime partner First Book. The largest and fastest-growing network of educators in the United States exclusively serving kids in need, First Book is a nonprofit organization that aims to remove barriers to quality education for all kids by making new books, educational materials and other essentials affordable to its member network of more than 500,000 educators. We’re proud to partner with Zulily to provide children with the gift of reading this holiday season.

Penguin Random House’s donation of 750,000 books to First Book as part of READ TOGETHER, BE TOGETHER is featured on CNN International’s “Impact Your World” series. This special series showcases how companies around the world are giving back during the COVID-19 crisis.

This donation is one of the many ways Penguin Random House is helping communities affected by the pandemic. To meet the urgent need expressed by educators coping with school closures as a result of COVID-19, the donated books will be sent to programs and schools that are currently delivering books, food, and supplies to our youngest citizens who are isolated and locked out of a learning environment.

See the video on CNN here.

Our two children’s divisions, Penguin Young Readers and Random House Children’s Books, in partnership with Meredith Corporation’s Parents, launched READ TOGETHER, BE TOGETHER (#ReadTogetherBeTogether), a nationwide initiative that celebrates the importance and power of reading with young children. Originally slated to launch in summer 2020 with nationwide retail, educator, and consumer activations, the program began in March, in light of COVID-19, with a series of daily virtual storytimes with bestselling and award-winning authors and illustrators, as well as celebrity readers.

As part of READ TOGETHER, BE TOGETHER, we are donating 750,000 books to First Book. To meet the urgent need expressed by educators coping with school closures, the donated books will be sent to programs and schools that are currently delivering books, food, and supplies to our youngest citizens who are isolated and locked out of a learning environment. In addition to the book donation, we are also covering the cost of shipping the books to First Book, valued at $25,000.

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.

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.

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.