Our plan
In order to be fully literate we believe it is vital that reading become a leisure activity, it has to move past the being a chore or something you do only to get your homework done. Key to this is owning your own books. When we looked at the schools around us which are largely populated by the children of the Stoney Nation we saw children from a culture with no written language tradition. The literacy rate among First Nations people is very low. This being so most of them owned no books of their own. There is no library on the reserve so once school was out they had no access to books. We had no money but as a library we have to weed the collection and it was with these books that we began, rather than selling them we would give them to these students. It was so much fun and the children were so excited we wanted to do it again. We began looking for sources of more books.
What we did
Because we chose to give away gently used children's books our money needs were fairly small. The Exshaw Library Society let us use some space for storage and book sorting. We began by putting the word out that we were looking for books. There are, as it turns out, many many homes full of books that the children have grown out of but no one had the heart to get rid of. We came up with the phrase "Finding new homes for orphaned books" and the books began pouring in. We sorted them by reading level and started handing them out. The local church thrift stores and rummage sales gave us all the children's books we asked for and the local second hand book store began giving us deep discounts. Our first school was Exshaw School in Exshaw, Alberta. By the second year we began distributing books at Morley School on the Stoney Indian Reserve. In year four, this year, we adopted two new schools that are at the far ends of the reserve, Te Otha School in Nordegg and Chief Jacob Bearspaw in Eden Valley. As of today we have given away over 23,000 books and are about to give out a couple of thousand more so the kids will have things to read over the long summer break. Just last week a library in High Prairie, Alberta has decided to run a Bonnybooks program of their own. We hope it is just the first of many. I know that there are towns with large ESL populations and inner city areas with high poverty and low literacy, this program takes nothing but a little space and a couple of willing volunteers and it can change children's worlds.
Our results
Literacy is a long game and I will not feel I have seen the end play until a generation from now. I want to know if these children will buy books for their babies. That will tell me that a long cycle of illiteracy has been broken. As for right now, we see students at the schools who are excited about books, who can't wait for the next story. Children for whom reading has become an act of pleasure rather than a reluctant duty. Children who take great pride in thier "home libraries". Their world has become a bigger place, one where possibilities for the future are endless.
aexclibrary@marigold.ab.ca
An update for the new year. We are opening a chapter of Bonnybooks in another town near the Hobemma reservation. We are delivering a load of childrens books to get them started.