Aligning the planets for Magazine Literacy on (EARTH) Day

We are aligning the planets for our 2012 (EARTH) Day magazine recycling juggernaut – sharing magazines with new readers.
(MERCURY) – get the word out to friends
(VENUS) – share your love of magazines
(MARS) – marshal troops and treasure
(JUPITER) – go big!

Join us!

Honoring our magazine literacy accomplishments on Leap Day

Leap Day gives me some extra time to thank everyone who makes our literacy work pop!

I recently had the proud opportunity to summarize our accomplishments – any and all of which only happen thanks to the incredible and MAGnificent support we get from you, our stakeholders – the volunteers, businesses, consumers, and literacy programs who help support our passion for literacy and help us to get wonderful magazines into the hands, homes, and hearts of new readers.

• Together, we have founded and operate MagazineLiteracy.org  the first and only global magazine industry-wide literacy project for children and families.
• Our mission and passion is to build an enormous literacy pipeline and to challenge the citizens of the world to fill it with magazines.
• We are changing the world, one magazine at a time, by tapping and celebrating the unique power of magazines as a literacy resource for at-risk children and families across the U.S. and around the world.
• We are assembling partnerships throughout the magazine publishing  and technology industries and beyond to create a vibrant online literacy marketplace where any consumer or business can send and any literacy agency can find new and recycled magazines for moms and kids in homeless and domestic violence shelters, domestic violence shelters, youth mentoring programs, job training programs, and to kids in foster care.
• We are organizing thousands of volunteers in hundreds of community and campus teams to collect and share wonderful magazines to support family literacy.
• We sent 40,000 surplus children’s magazines to all Head Start programs in Mississippi after Katrina.
• We match businesses to send magazines to children and families in community literacy programs.
• We inspire magazine readers to share the wonderful magazines they love with children and families hungry to read.
• We are creating a lean, but vast supply chain necessary to support magazine literacy logistics on a global scale.

Onward!

Crowdsourcing magazine literacy

We are exploring ways to crowdsource components of our literacy work to broaden and deepen our community impact. We are building a simple, global, assembly line process for the collection, sorting, and delivery of new and gently read magazines to new readers – children and moms in homeless and domestic violence shelters, foster care, mentoring, and job training programs. Simple, elegant solutions executed by masses of hands, hearts, and minds will ease the replication of our ideas and the engagement of our stakeholders. The labor and information intensive tasks that help to describe our magazine inventory for our literacy agents can be broken down into bite-size pieces for scores of volunteers to add-value and then re-assembled into our global literacy marketplace for consumption by literacy programs and their clients. For example, the better job we do describing our magazines and their content, the easier it will be for literacy programs to request specific items and bundles to meet the reading needs and interests of their own clients. This will improve the quality of matches between available reading materials and literacy needs, increasing the contribution of our combined effort, while reducing waste and inefficiency where resources are already scarce.