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Earth Day is a wonderful milestone for MagazineLiteracy.org. We launched our KinderHarvest magazine recycling project on Earth Day a couple of years ago, kicking it off by matching 40,000+ surplus children’s magazines at publisher printing plants to all the Head Start programs in Mississippi and, in partnership with food banks in New Hampshire and Maine to families in New England served by food pantries.

Since Earth Day last year, an incredible volunteer organizer in the Boston area - Katie Simmons - has collected and recycled 5,000 magazines to children and families in 20 locations, including homeless and domestic violence shelters, transitional housing and work empowerment programs, senior centers, youth mentoring programs, a VA hospital, and other community programs. The feedback from agencies receiving magazines has been overwhelmingly positive.

This week, I heard from the teachers at an elementary school in Maryland who self-initiated and then completely managed a magazine drive with students that collected 523 magazines for a local food pantry and shelter. The great power of this effort, aside from feeding hundreds of children and families hungry to read, is that it was done on their own by utilizing the information on our website. This is exactly the kind of leveraged effort that we are working to replicate in communities across the U.S. and around the world, working with education, reading, magazine, and hunger relief, and other stakeholders.

Learn more about our grassroots magazine literacy campaigns and how to start one in your community in our Magazine Literacy Bee blog, written by volunteers. Sign-up today to launch a KinderHarvest magazine recycling team in your town.

Magazine Literacy Bee - changing the world, one magazine at a time.

We have spent some time learning about what steps are important in order to deploy successful, sustained magazine recycling projects at the community level.

The top-most lesson is that we need to form self-reliant local teams to set-up and operate KinderHarvest magazine recycling efforts in their own communities. The members of the teams work together on a number of mission-critical tasks, such as:

• recruiting others to help
• selecting team leads
• finding shelters and literacy programs that would like to receive recycled magazines for their children and families
• placing magazine collection bins and organizing other magazine collection drives
• picking up magazines
• meeting at least once a month to sort, count, label and bundle magazines for delivery
• delivering the magazines to shelters and other literacy programs
• promoting their recycling project in our blog and local media
• fundraising to cover the expense of local supplies, such as labels and collection bins.

If this matches your interests, please complete this volunteer form to provide your contact and availability information. For more information, read our Magazine Literacy Bee blog written by our volunteers around the world.

We are grateful for your interest and time and look forward to working with you to change the world - one magazine at a time!

We are just getting started with the nonprofitforce application created by Salesforce.com. Our tremendous potential and power is driven by leveraging technology. Salesforce is the most incredible, flexible, robust tool I have ever encountered. We are already creating customized apps to fit our unique business needs. We thank Salesforce.com for their vision and generous support of the non-profit sector.

Recently I scanned posting across a number of Freecycle sites and found hundreds of listings over the course of just a few weeks for magazines looking for a new home. It served as a remarkable desire for people to share the magazines they love with others. As we grow and establish KinderHarvest magazine recycling for literacy programs in these communities, we will bask in this generosity.

Recycling a plastic bottle instead of pitching it in the trash can create a park bench, a good cause.

Recycling a favorite magazine to a new reader can change a child’s life, launching dreams that can create an Antarctic or Mars explorer!

Help change the world… one magazine at a time!

Organize a KinderHarvest project in your school or community.

We marked our third anniversary on this International Literacy Day - September 8th with the kick-off of a KinderHarvest magazine recycling partnership at the Whole Foods Markets in West Windsor, New Jersey, near Princeton, and in Brighton just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Here we have three great volunteers - Katie Simmons with a wonderful young reader at the Brighton Whole Foods Market, and Mana Bahtt and Lauren Dymyd at the Princeton store.

The events where a huge success with lots of magazines collected from consumers that will be given to new readers in nearby homeless and domestic violence shelters, and in other local literacy programs. The bins will remain in the stores so that shoppers can drop off their magazines year-round.

To celebrate International Literacy Day, an event that occurs on September 8th each year, and the start of the new school year, the Whole Foods Markets in Princeton New Jersey and Brighton, near Boston Massachusetts, will join with MagazineLiteracy.org to kick-off the KinderHarvest magazine recycling drive for literacy. These Whole Foods Market locations are the first in the nation to rollout a KinderHarvest magazine recycling drive year-round for children and families learning to read. Wooden harvest bins will be placed in the stores to collect the recycled magazines from consumers, which will be given to at-risk children and families in nearby homeless and domestic violence shelters, and delivered to families in grocery bags at food pantries.

By collecting magazines from those who love to read them and sending them to new readers, the effort combines a concern for environmental issues with a concern for literacy that is resonating with consumers and business owners alike.

KinderHarvest, the first effort of its kind, is like food gleaning, a practice that is thousands of years old, where crops left in the field are gathered by humanitarians to feed hungry people. Except, this harvest gleans magazines that would have ended up at the curb to feed children and families hungry to read and succeed, recycling the magazines we all love to meet local literacy needs. KinderHarvest combines the three R’s of education with the three R’s of recycling to promote the three R’s of magazine literacy: Read, Rescue, and Reuse.

One of the great joys of being involved with a project like MagazineLiteracy.org, because it is an ongoing, national, magazine industry-wide literacy campaign for children and families, is that it puts you on the leading edge of new phenomena. You can energize and drive fresh consumer behavior and trends. It’s both an opportunity and responsibility.

MagazineLiteracy.org launched the KinderHarvest program to collect recent copies of gently used magazines from consumers that are recycled to children and families - new readers in homeless and domestic violence shelters and other community programs. Hundreds of copies of magazines are collected each week in wooden harvest bins and in other ways in cities across the U.S., with efforts getting started from Boston to San Francisco and from Chicago to Dallas.

Those who love magazines, as I do, know that it is not uncommon to have collections of favorite titles that span many years. Whether it’s scouring Ebay for every issue of Wooden Boat magazine or adding to your collection each month every issue of Oprah magazine Martha Stewart Living, we have a love affair with our magazines. During the past couple of years, the Magazine Publishers of America, a steady partner and friend of our work, has celebrated this affinity with a marketing campaign that focuses on the powerful forces that “engage” magazine readers.

With KinderHarvest, we are noticing a phenomenon that builds on the tremendous personal value we place on our magazines - entire collections of magazine titles that span many years are showing up in our recycling bins at Starbucks and other locations. Consumers who could not bear to toss their periodical collections are willing to share them with others. This is a most precious act of kindness that further demonstrates the great value of the recycling channel that we have set up to connect communities of readers. The following note that I received today from a volunteer in Dallas underscores this wonderful trend:

Please let me know of any way I could help you in this project. I… have, many, many, MANY, magazines laying around the house.( Can’t throw ‘em away…)

If you love your magazines, set them free, so others may learn and love to read them!

We are building our Web 2.0 capabilities by working on projects that will port our mission-critical magazine matching capabilities to the Ruby on Rails framework. Be sure to thank our technology sponsors that have donated web server space and other web development tools.

We have partnered with ThinkHost - a green web server run completely on solar and wind energy - perfect for our KinderHarvest magazine recycling applications.

We have also partnered with High Speed Rails, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that will vastly improve our ability to scale our web applications as our visibility grows.

Also, be sure to join the MagazineLiteracy.org Cause at Facebook and invite your friends.

Cheers!

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Northwestern University.

Low Literacy Equals Early Death Sentence

CHICAGO — Not being able to read doesn’t just make it harder to navigate each day. Low literacy impairs people’s ability to obtain critical information about their health and can dramatically shorten their lives.

A new study from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine shows that older people with inadequate health literacy had a 50 percent higher mortality rate over five years than people with adequate reading skills. Inadequate or low health literacy is defined as the inability to read and comprehend basic health-related materials such as prescription bottles, doctor appointment slips and hospital forms.

Low health literacy was the top predictor of mortality after smoking, also surpassing income and years of education, the study showed. Most of the difference in mortality among people with inadequate literacy was due to higher rates of death from cardiovascular disease.

“It’s a matter of life or death,” said David Baker, M.D., lead author of the study and chief of general internal medicine at the Feinberg School and at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “The excess number of deaths among people with low literacy was huge. The magnitude of this shocked us.”

“When patients can’t read, they are not able to do the things necessary to stay healthy,” Baker noted. “They don’t know how to take their medications correctly, they don’t understand when to seek medical care, and they don’t know how to care for their diseases. Baker thinks this is why they are much more likely to die.

The study was published in Archives of Internal Medicine July 23.

More than 75 million adults in the United States have only basic or below basic health literacy, according to the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

“There is a certain minimum set of reading skills that are required to be able to do the things that you’re expected to do as a patient,” Baker said. “And if someone is below that level, bad things are going to happen.”

Thank you Active Reload for donating an account for use of your wonderful Lighthouse collaboration and service tracking application for our Web 2.0 application development and other projects. Lighthouse allows us to organize our teams of Ruby on Rails developers who are busy upgrading our capabilities. The tools allows our volunteers to rapidly build mission critical functions and to organize and manage other projects for marshaling resource donations - magazines for kids and families; donated dollars; and volunteer time. When you consider that everything we do involves a project, large or small, the possibilities and the value created by Lighthouse are endless. In addition to web application development, we are also using the capability to organize volunteers around grassroots projects that meet literacy needs in their own communities. We are continually finding new ways to utilize this powerful gift.

The mightiest oak grows from a single acorn; the mightiest wave, from a single ripple. Thus, we’ve changed our MagazineLiteracy.org tag line to - “Changing the world - one magazine at a time,” because it speaks to the enormous power that the contribution of even a single magazine, an hour of volunteer time, or a dollar of financial support can have. As illustrated in one very special letter that one of many very special volunteers received about one boy in a Boston homeless shelter - a single magazine can change the life of a child and bring joy to a whole family.

“Feeding children and families hungry to read and succeed” has not been retired. It’s been moved to a new job as tag line for our national KinderHarvest magazine recycling program.

I stopped by to check on one of our KinderHarvest bins recently and there was only one magazine in it during a period of time that most other bins would be overflowing. The shopkeeper was concerned about it and even apologetic. I explained how tremendously valuable that single magazine will be to a child or to a family that arrives at a homeless or domestic violence shelter with no possessions. One single act of generosity inspires two, or three, or ten. Those inspire two more, or three more, or ten more each. That single magazine sitting in the bin will be noticed by someone who will be curious about why it’s there. Someone who sees it will go home and bring back their wonderful magazines to help fill the bin. It reminds me of the food drives that I’ve been organizing in front of supermarkets for over two decades. We begin in the early morning with an empty grocery cart greeting shoppers on their way into the store. After a short while, a single jar of peanut butter, or jar of baby food, or box of oatmeal is placed in the cart. That catches the eye of new shoppers who put more and more food in the cart - sometimes, whole bags filled with groceries; often, more than they keep for themselves. By the end of the day; we have twenty or more overflowing grocery carts of food for nearby hungry families.

Help us change the world - one magazine at a time!

After just a few weeks, we are collecting hundreds of copies of favorite magazines from consumers recycling them for literacy in KinderHarvest bins at six Starbucks locations in central New Jersey, including over 85 titles.

I stopped in for a cup of coffee at Starbucks today and already found wonderful magazine donations piling up in our wooden KinderHarvest bin, including Bicycle and Entertainment Weekly. Keep them coming and be in touch to set up KinderHarvest in your business, school, or town. The attractive wooden crates supplied by the Tri-State Crating & Pallet Co. are a perfect fit for our magazine collections and amazing to everyone I show them to. They are sturdy “harvest” boxes, but collapsible, making storage and shipping to KinderHarvest projects in other communities a snap.

There is a story in my family of a patriarch who would give his mom a gift on his birthday. This represents a classic pay it forward celebration of unselfish gratitude for the gifts that others have given to us from the time we were born and throughout our lives. Literacy is a gift instilled by deliberate and caring mentors - especially our parents and teachers. Recently, I made a couple of visits to my parents to celebrate their back-to-back birthdays. I left their home arms full with a box and a grocery bag of magazines in mint condition - Audubon, George, and Popular Science - a particular favorite of mine that launched countless dreams of invention for this young reader. These magazines will be recycled by KinderHarvest to children and families in homeless and domestic violence shelters so they may know a bit of that same joy. Happy birthday mom and dad.

Combining their well-known passion for environmental and literacy causes, Princeton area Starbucks are among the first consumer shops in the nation to rollout the KinderHarvest magazine recycling drive for children and families learning to read. KinderHarvest breathes a new life into magazines that would otherwise be discarded and destroyed by collecting recent, gently used copies and sending them to at-risk children and families. Wooden harvest bins have been set up at participating Starbucks locations where consumers can drop of magazines for all ages. The magazines will be delivered to children and families served by nearby homeless and domestic violence shelters, as well as in bags of groceries picked up at food pantries. KinderHarvest gets wonderful magazines into the hands, homes, and hearts of children and families who want to learn and love to read. The summer, when children are away from school, is the most important time to reinforce families reading together.

KinderHarvest is like food gleaning, a practice that is thousands of years old, where crops left in the field are gathered by humanitarians to feed hungry people. Except this harvest gleans magazines that would have ended up at the curb to feed children and families hungry to read and succeed, recycling the magazines we all love to meet local literacy needs. This first-ever program combines the three R’s of education with the three R’s of recycling to promote the three R’s of magazine literacy: Read, Rescue, and Reuse. So far, KinderHarvest has collected thousands of surplus magazines from publishers, and sent them to children and families served by food banks and to children rebuilding their young lives from Hurricane Katrina. This effort expands the KinderHarvest program to create a national model that engages businesses and consumers to meet literacy needs at their own grassroots community level.

I was caught off-guard a bit recently when someone asked about what magazines I like to read. Of course I have many favorites and always have. It’s fun to find them in the mailbox and I can’t pass a newsstand without stopping to see the latest issues.

It got me thinking, though, that I could do more to organize the kinds of magazine literacy projects that I am asking others to create in their own communities - to walk the talk. Moving magazines around from donors to new readers is heavy, hard work. It’s better to roll up my sleeves, and be able to say “do as I do,” rather than just “do as I say.” This also gives me a chance to learn first-hand about what works and what can use improvement.

So, I decided to organize a KinderHarvest magazine collection here in Princeton. Early in the morning, I stopped by a Starbucks that agreed to set up a magazine collection bin. The first lesson I learned from that is just how much interest there is in this idea of recycling magazines for literacy, and how easy it can be to get started. At lunch, I visited a favorite restaurant that always has great magazines in its well-appointed lobby to ask if I could pick up the ones ready to discard. At the end of the day, I visited a grocery store with a wonderful and growing magazine collection to ask about setting up a bin for recycled magazines from their shoppers.

During a few very receptive telephone calls to sign up food pantries and homeless shelters to receive the magazines, the director of an adult education program noted the types of magazines that would be most interesting and useful to her students. Our model has always been to defer to teachers and other literacy agents to define their needs, because they know them best. Our mission is to inspire and match new and gently used magazine donations to fill those needs. I know that the volunteers across the U.S. organizing KinderHarvest and other magazine literacy projects encounter this challenge every day. It just hit home that much more clearly to hear it directly from this local literacy leader.

So this reinforced in my mind the importance of having a way for literacy programs to indicate their magazine preferences - perhaps using an online form (now on the drawing board). It also underscores that it will be important to be able to sort magazines for delivery, so that all can be put to good use. I also developed sample letters that can be used by KinderHarvest volunteers in other communities to get their magazine collections started.

I a couple of days, I will pick up a batch of magazines and deliver a bit of “home” to children and families in a nearby homeless shelter. It’s a nice walk.

We now have two kindergarten teachers, Ron in San Francisco and Katie in Boston, organizing KinderHarvest efforts with or for their students, giving us coast to coast activity and representing the awesome power of single individuals who take it upon themselves to make a difference. The amazing thing as that each teacher jumped into action within 24 hours of getting in touch with MagazineLiteracy.org, and as you will see below, have put together comprehensive plans for finding lots of magazines to recycle for literacy. They are wonderfully relentless! Our Boston teacher has connected with another great KinderHarvest leader in Boston, Katie Simmons, forming a collaboration that is already fueling both their efforts.

Here’s an excerpt from our Magazine Literacy Bee blog about Ron’s effort in San Francisco:

Hi everyone! …I teach kindergarten in San Francisco. Recently, my class has been doing a lot of science work in the area of ecology and recycling, so I was trying to figure out a good field trip to support that… last Saturday I hooked up with VolunteerMatch.com and posted that I was interested in helping the environment. Right away they had me linked with the KinderHarvest program, which provides a route for helping us get our schools’ and families’ “gently used” magazines to local homeless kids and youth… we are currently looking into local programs that service homeless kids and families. I even mentioned KinderHarvest to my students yesterday at dismissal time, and they seemed genuinely enthusiastic to get involved. It’s very exciting to think that my students will be getting a unique, hands-on experience in helping reuse products, and thus “saving the earth” in their own small way. Also, they will get the added bonus of actually being able to help in some small way those who need it, which I am sure will be a real awareness-raiser as time goes on.

Here is what Katie, the Boston kindergarten teacher reports:

I would also like to focus on generating magazines for food banks and shelters… Here are some of my ideas for how to gather as many magazines as possible… I have good friends who work at schools that they would be willing to contact their parents’ families about it… I have a friend who works at a local hospital, so I’m sure she’d be able collect a lot of children’s magazines… the library is right across the street from me, so I will check in with them to see if the librarians would be willing to contribute magazines… I have collected quite a stack of extra new and gently used Scholastic magazines over the past year that I would be willing to donate… I will scout out nearby grocery/convenience stores with good collections of children’s magazines…

Here are some ideas from Katie Simmons, a Boston KinderHarvest leader:

I’ve begun to reach out to shelters and foodbanks in my area, and a local Boys & Girls club has expressed interest in receiving magazine - especially with the summer months coming… I have a preschool teacher friend who agreed to have a collection bin. Many of the parents have older children so I am hoping they have subscriptions to donate… I have a friend who is an elementary school principal who will share Highlights magazines… I have made contact with the Children’s Room at the library, which agreed to share their older magazines for children. I picked up Ladybug, Babybug, Cricket and Cobbletone… I have a contact at a nearby hospital that receives monthly mags that would just get tossed or recycled, so she said I am welcome to come by an get them… I will also ask a friend in the suburbs who is part of a babysitting co-op, to email her huge audience to request magazine donations… I would think supermarkets and pharmacies would be a great places to set up a magazine drive!

Let’s get going in all the communities between Boston and San Francisco, and between Chicago and New Orleans!