BookSpring

BookSpring champions early literacy to empower children with a lifelong love of reading.
We:
• Support families with the tools they need to cultivate reading from birth on.
• Serve as a pace setter and community catalyst to illustrate how reading can unleash
all that every individual has the capacity to become.
• Initiate collaboration with others to improve access to literacy opportunities.
• And, most importantly, open the world to children through reading

Description:
By passionately driving early literacy development, BookSpring equips children, families and communities with the reading tools and skills required for long-term success.
BookSpring, in affiliation with Reading Is Fundamental and Reach Out and Read, instills children with a love of reading and promotes books as a means to success. By offering a range of programs that support early literacy, BookSpring champions the value of reading and encourages parents to read to their children from birth on, resulting in stronger families and increased life-long opportunities for every child.

History:
Two important indicators of the success of a society are the level of literacy of its children and youth, and the extent of disparities in literacy skills among children and youth with differing characteristics and family backgrounds. The inability to read well can have a direct impact on an individual's self-esteem and ability to advance socially and academically. The vast majority of high school drop-outs, welfare recipients, and prisoners score poorly on reading assessments, and low literacy levels are strongly associated with low paying jobs, unemployment, poverty, and, crime. By passionately driving early literacy development, BookSpring equips children, families and communities with the tools and skills required for long-term success.

BookSpring provides essential literacy programs to the Austin-area. We are the local provider of nationally-renowned literacy programs Reading Is Fundamental and Reach Out and Read. BookSpring formed from the merger of these two local organizations with the purpose of increasing the literacy level of our community's children. The organizations merged on March 1, 2008, to create a new organization – BookSpring. We have the unique opportunity to reach families at the very earliest point in their child's development and encourage and support them in taking advantage of the critical early months and years of brain development. BookSpring focuses on increasing the literacy level of our community by changing the literacy-related behaviors of parents and students. Our objective is to make book sharing and reading aloud an integral part of family activities so that children grow up from infancy with books and a love of reading. While retaining the current programs, we plan to develop additional program models to create a continuum of literacy development opportunities for prospective and current parents in the Austin area.

Contact people:

Junie Parish, Volunteer Coordinator, (512) 472-1791 x.101, (email) Janet Sharkis, Program Director, (512) 472-1791 x. 107, (email) Mindy Gomillion, Executive Director, (512) 472-1791 x.108, (email)

Office fax number: (512) 927-9366

Address:

2006 Greenbrook Pkwy Austin, TX 78723 (See a map)

Web Site: http://www.bookspring.org

Last updated on March 17, 2009