In December 2020, nearly a hundred employee volunteers from PRH US participated in our 9th annual Dinner on the House in partnership with City Harvest, a volunteer experience designed to serve others and share our good fortune with those who may need a helping hand during the holiday season. We’ve previously held this event as an in-person volunteering experience at City Harvest‘s food rescue facility in Long Island City. This year, with in-person volunteering no longer a viable option due to the pandemic, we looked to City Harvest, an organization focused on feeding hungry New Yorkers,  to create new, virtual volunteer opportunities for our employees. Employees volunteered in one of two ways:

• Holiday Greeting Cards: City Harvest delivers food to over 400 community food programs serving thousands more New Yorkers a day than before the pandemic. Our volunteers wrote holiday greeting cards to send to City Harvest’s many partners. 
• Mini Mesh Bags: During the holiday season, City Harvest Repackers use thousands of mesh bags each day to pack fresh produce that will go into their trucks and be delivered to food pantries and community food programs across the five boroughs. Our volunteers helped make these bags which keeps costs down and ensures more money can be spent on emergency food.

In addition to our employees donating their time, Penguin Random House made a donation to City Harvest as part of the Repack to Give Back campaign, which will provide 200,000 pounds of produce and non-perishable goods to 384,000 families in need this holiday season.

Since 1997, we have partnered with Read Ahead in New York City to match public school students with Penguin Random House employee volunteers for one-on-one mentorship. Read Ahead is dedicated to helping students unlock their full potential through mentoring relationships, fostering the social and emotional skills that are essential for academic and life-long success. Penguin Random House volunteers offer one-on-one support to NYC public school mentees in grades K-5 throughout the school year, helping them develop their love of reading, confidence, and skills to thrive in school and beyond.

Starting this year, we’re excited to expand the program to all of our U.S. employees through a virtual mentorship program hosted on Zoom. Student need is greater than ever this year, with the added challenges of COVID-19 and remote learning, which have had a significant impact on school communities. We’re honored to continue our partnership with Read Ahead and provide their students with engaged PRH mentors from across the country.

Throughout the year, the Dodgers Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program typically hosts Dodger Days as community-based resource fairs at local parks for thousands of kids and their families in Southern California. In response to COVID-19, the new “drive-thru” series is an adjustment from its in-person format.  The Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation (LADF) conducted a needs assessment with the Dodgers RBI families, their youth development program for 5 to 18-year-olds. Of the youth currently enrolled in this program, 25% have household incomes below $20,000 annually. Through this assessment, they found that the majority of families indicated lack of access to books as a barrier to distance learning.

The LADF hosted five drive-thru events in June, providing over $480,000 in food boxes, exercise and fitness resources, softball and baseball equipment, books, and educational support to feed families and help youth stay active and healthy.

Penguin Random House donated 500 books that were given away to attending families for their children.

Through the LADF, the Dodgers have been providing critical donations to support the local COVID-19 relief efforts that will hopefully uplift significantly impacted Angelenos, including the most vulnerable populations. In 2017, PRH also partnered with the L.A. Dodgers and LADF on their joint initiative, LA Reads, to help address the literacy crisis in Los Angeles, by getting children excited about reading, with a special event at the Los Angeles Central Library.

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.

In an effort to support America’s restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, we published Family Meal: Recipes from Our Community, a digital-only cookbook benefiting America’s restaurant workers. All proceeds from Family Meal support the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. It is one humble attempt to do our part to support the places and people that make our cities special.

The book’s publication coincided with #GivingTuesdayNow, which took place for the first time on May 5 as an emergency response to the unprecedented need caused by COVID-19. This global day of unity inspired us to join forces to support those in need during this global crisis. So we united the best way we know how—by bringing together authors from across Penguin Random House to serve up something truly special. Our family of more than 50 chefs and home cooks have opened their kitchens to share a look at the food they’re cooking at home right now—food that comforts, sustains, and helps them feel connected to the world outside.

Together with Brightly, our website dedicated to helping parents, caregivers, and educators find books and reading tips for every age and stage of a child’s life, we joined with our long-standing partner Save the Children to support its annual reading campaign—Read a Story, Change Their Story. The 100 Days of Reading campaign aims to combat the summer slide—which will be further exacerbated because of the unprecedented school closures due to COVID-19—and the content that Brightly has provided, including reading lists and educational activities, will greatly support kids and families in need.

For the fifth year, we supported Make Summer Fair, Save the Children’s Summer Reading Campaign. The campaign was created to foster continuous learning over the summer months and to ensure that children in rural America, many of whom have limited access to books, have the opportunity to keep reading. To further increase our impact, we teamed up with Zulily, the online retailer, to help provide books to children in need across the nation with a  “Buy 1, Give 1” campaign.

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.

In response to the difficult financial choices so many of our indie bookstore partners are having to make in the wake of COVID-19, Out of Print, one of Penguin Random House’s companies, found itself in a unique position to help. For a couple days, 25% of sales on its website were donated to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), to lift bookstores hit hardest by the social-distancing efforts and forced closures across the nation. This special retail event raised $19,500 for booksellers in need.

The $19,500 raised will help 19 families of bookstore employees to pay the rent and cover expenses for a month. Binc has more than 400 claims in process, and more are expected. Out of Print plans to continue to use its platform and merchandise to show appreciation and to assist various teacher, librarian, and bookstore groups during this crisis. The fundraiser was included in a special offer for tote bags that also served as a bit of “retail therapy” for readers while they supported the bookstores they love.

To highlight the pertinent issues faced by women around the globe, which were heightened due to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, we organized a series of conversations with stellar Penguin authors, hosted by journalist Pragya Tiwari. The spectacular panel of authors puts the spotlight on topical and relevant themes, which aim to support women by way of empowering them with information, building awareness in the community, and opening doors to more such pathbreaking conversations. In conversation with Tiwari over five distinct episodes, our authors addressed wide-ranging concerns. Sohaila Abdulali and Samra Zafar addressed the issue of domestic violence and sexual abuse, while Kavita Krishnan discussed the idea of women’s safety and personal freedom. Economic journalist Puja Mehra talked about the economy and finance in the context of the current global environment, and Shiromi Pinto spoke on why women artists and architects are often forgotten. To learn more, click here and here.

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.

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.

We partnered with Hospital Radio and National Prison Radio to broadcast free audiobooks to patients in NHS hospitals and people in prison across the U.K., offering comfort, escape, and entertainment.

The Hospital Broadcasting Association is a charity supporting a network of more than 200 volunteer-run hospital radio stations that broadcast direct to patients’ bedsides in every NHS hospital in England. During the COVID-19 crisis, there are strict limitations on visiting patients in the hospital—including those not admitted for COVID-19-related reasons—meaning many patients are in even more need of comfort and distraction than ever before. A carefully curated collection of audiobooks was donated, with each station able to choose which titles they want to broadcast.

Made by prisoners, for prisoners, National Prison Radio broadcasts live into the cells of over 100 prisons across England and Wales. The award-winning station is run by the Prison Radio Association charity and offers a unique, innovative, and effective way to communicate with prisoners and engage them in education, debate, and community—aiming to reduce reoffending. The prison population is particularly vulnerable during COVID-19, and as a result, many prisons are on stricter lockdown measures, meaning that many inmates are confined to their cells for large portions of the day and activities are on hold. A collection of carefully curated audiobooks has been donated for broadcast in a new Penguin Life Stories program each week, and will also be made available for Radio Wanno—HMP Wandsworth’s radio station.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.