As part of its efforts to expand child literacy, a local club partnered with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library late last year and has used a recent grant to send books to more children.
The Chatham-Kent Kiwanis Club now has almost 230 children registered for the program, which delivers one book a month for children under five at no cost to the family. The Imagination Library develops a list of books and manages the monthly mailing while the Kiwanis Club handles local promotion and registration.
“They’re age-appropriate, geared to the age, so a one-year-old gets a different book than a two-year-old and a three-year-old gets a different book,” Chuck Scott with the Kiwanis Club said.
The club received $9,000 in grant money in June split between the Chatham Kent Community Foundation and the South Kent Wind Fund. Scott said they had just over 100 children registered before the grant came in, which was the maximum they could handle at the time.
“Initially because of the limited numbers and the demand, we limited it to Chatham postal codes, but with the grant, we decided we would expand it across all of Chatham-Kent,” he said.
With the new funding, Scott said they are able to handle up to 300 children, though they are limiting the program to one child per household for now.
However, the funding covers those 300 children for one year and the club has promised the families their children will be covered until they turn five.
“We need to continue to find funding that will let us continue to support those children until their fifth birthday,” Scott said. “Our hope is that we can find additional funding, either through grants or other public support because that would allow us to at least continue.”
Beyond securing the program throughout these early years, Scott said they could also expand the program beyond 300 people if the funding became available.
The club has worked on literacy programs with the Chatham-Kent Public Library and a few local schools. Scott said after the COVID-19 pandemic began they started to look for ways to accommodate club members and children in these efforts.
“It was something we could do during COVID because it didn’t mean personal contact,” he said. “We thought it was good for children’s literacy, which is our focus and we could do that now.”
The books are all hard-covered and the book lists include Canadian authors and illustrators.
Scott said their goal is to get children interested in reading at a young age and potentially put them on a good path before they start school.
“Children get different opportunities at all different levels, but our hope is as the more books they have, the more their parents read with them, the more time they spend with books, the better their marks will be at school,” he said.
Registration information is available at www.chatham-kentkiwanis.com/imagination-library-online-registration.
Donations are accepted at https://donate.imaginationlibrary.com/#ca-ONCHATHAMKENT.