After a successful 2021, Project Open Books established new goals for 2022. While we will continue to improve individual access to LGBTQIA+ affirming books and support queer authors, we also want to begin collaborating more frequently with educators.
And… we’re off to a great start! Thanks to the generosity of our individual donors, we’ve been able to sponsor 3 school donations so far this year.
At the end of January, we provided 20 copies of The Henna Wars to Hamden Hall Country Day School (Connecticut) for all of the high school students participating in the Pride Alliance book club. We are also working on coordinating a Q&A with the author of The Henna Wars so that the students will have the opportunity to virtually meet the author.
A few days later, Project Open Books collaborated with a social worker at Randolph Academy, which is a K-12 public school in Upstate New York that supports, empowers, and educates students with emotional and mental disabilities. We were able to donate 15 books to this school.
Finally, in what’s capped off a busy couple of months to this year, Project Open Books was able to donate 16 LGBTQIA+ affirming books to Thurston Elementary in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We worked previously with a first-grade teacher from Thurston Elementary in the spring of 2021, and she reached out to us again with the following message:
“Thank you so much for contributing to and supporting our diverse, inclusive, first grade classroom. It was especially important this year, as I have a student who is beginning to explore their gender identity. It is so incredibly heartwarming to see my student be able to identify with characters in books that are just like them. In supporting this student, I approached our school librarian to see if they could offer additional titles that I can share with this student and their family. Unfortunately, we had NO titles available! […] I would really love to be able to share more books with a broader audience (the whole school of 500+ students) by adding more LGBTQIA+ books to our school library.”
