TULSA, Okla. — February 22 is a call to action for everyone in Green Country to volunteer in your community as 2 News Oklahoma partners with several organizations for 2 Cares for the Community Day.
One of those organizations, Gaining Ground, is looking to get books into the hands of children to make sure they continue their learning all year. The nonprofit focuses on kids in under-served communities to get them engaging books and programming after-school and during the summer.
Gaining Ground says that kids without access to books slide back in literacy skills over the summer.
"They then come back to school, and they grow as learners and readers only to come to another summer break," said Lisa Shotts, executive director of Gaining Ground. "And they slide back again."
Shotts says, historically, by the end of the 6th grade, students without access to reading materials are three school years behind their peers in literacy skills.
"So our total mission is to fill homes with books and then to provide all of those kiddos with engaging literacy opportunities after school and throughout the summer, to not only close the literacy gap, but or not only provide books and to stop this summer slide, but also to narrow that literacy gap that historically happens in underserved communities," Shotts said.
Gaining Ground has been around for five years and, in that time, has distributed roughly 270,000 new and engaging, culturally relevant books.
"We started very small," Shotts said. "We started with two schools, and now we're at seven."
All those books take a lot of donations from the community, either in the form of dollars for Gaining Ground to purchase the books or via book donations.
"You can also volunteer. We put on literacy nights at each of our schools, which is seven literacy nights, where it's a huge celebration, where the parents can pick up the new books, we offer other resources," Shotts said. "We always need volunteers for those types of programs or those types of events. You can always volunteer at our warehouse and organize the books."
The warehouse works very differently than what you might see in a school library.
"We do it by age," Shotts said. "So we have huge shelving out at the warehouse. And so when we get a shipment in or a big donation, we organize it by age so that we can effectively when we know we have to be at a school and they say 'we have you know, 100 kindergarteners,' we can easily go pull a set of books for them and take it to them."
Donate directly here.
"So it's it is expensive to buy new books for kiddos but we believe that they deserve new books we believe that they're, you know, we provide the equity of access to books," Shotts said. "So it's important every single day because research shows that you need over 100 books, engaging books, not just any book, engaging books in the home to really make that difference for kids. It used to be the parent income and their education level that was the indicators for their children's academic success. Now, research shows that it's the number of books in their home. So 100 books seem to be the tipping point. So our goal is never-ending."
Stay in touch with us anytime, anywhere --
- Download our free app for Apple, Android and Kindle devices.
- Sign up for daily newsletters emailed to you
- Like us on Facebook
- Follow us on Instagram
- Follow us on Twitter
