BookTrust Care Packages
Lockdown has been very challenging for families and has limited children’s access to education. To help as many children as possible to have access to books and the life-changing benefits that reading brings, BookTrust has given out thousands of care packages through local communities to help the children that most need some extra support.
Not all families are lucky enough to have lots of books for their children at home, and with schools and libraries closed for so long, we wanted to help as many children as possible to have access to a variety of books and stories to read and to share during lockdown, to make sure they didn’t miss out.
From April to July BookTrust worked with community partners to provide packages of books which were given out through schools, children’s centres, foodbanks and community groups. Grouped into different age groups, community partners could select packages for early years, primary or secondary aged children. In total we’ve been able to give out over 237,000 books to families in England, Wales and NI.
We remain incredibly thankful to our partners who have become local community champions in distributing the books to families in safe and innovative ways to ensure that fewer children miss out on the benefits of shared reading.
'We are all in this together, and yet the impact of lockdown is not shared equally,’ said Diana Gerald, BookTrust CEO. 'Reading, and shared reading not only enables children to escape to fantasy worlds; it also supports language development, communication skills and confidence, and can be hugely reassuring in a world that for many is now very challenging. Getting books to famlies has always been important; now, getting them to families in struggling circumstances is absolutely mission critical.'
Please support our work if you can with a donation to BookTrust to help make sure that more children can receive books and support, now and over the coming months.
