This month marks our
third year of doing 1000 Books Before Kindergarten in La Crosse!!
It has been an amazingly fun journey.
Over
850 children have joined the program (in our community of 51K) and
172 have reached the 1000 books goal.
So far over
257, 200 books (yes...over a quarter of a million!!) have been read to kids in our community as a result of this program.
Our program was built so it could evolve to adapt to how parents and children react to the materials and incentives. Here is how we've changed:
Materials: Our
first recording sheet asked parents to write down every title read. Then it morphed to
bookmarks with 100 seeds to mark off. It has
settled comfortably into a sheet with seeds, ten lines for favorite titles to be recorded and little literacy tips on each sheet.
Incentives: Stickers are king and queen for the kids and their most treasured part of each return visit. Kids still receive a nursery rhyme fingerpuppet at 500 and a book on completion. When we first started our focus group encouraged us to give out logo-infused incentives to parents at 300 (lanyard), 500 (window cling), 800 (fridge magnet) and 1000 (book bag) levels. We soon realized the parents didn't care. So now, the book bag is given out at sign-up and that is the most prized parental possession (as well as great advertisement for the program around the community!)
Inclusiveness: The program was designed for 1-5 year olds because we wanted the kids to realize the excitement of what was happening. But what about the babies?!?! Our new early literacy librarian Brooke Rasche came on board a year ago and immediately developed and wrote a grant to fund
Baby Book Bees to dovetail into our garden themed 1000 Books. With their first 100 books read, graduate Bees have a head start by the time they join 1000 Books. We have
44 babies in this new program!
We continue to talk the programs up, include them on our program flyers and distribute posters to daycares and schools to alert families to what's available. It has been a win-win program for our community and is one that more and more libraries are adding.
If you have added a 1000 Books Before Kindergarten program at your library, please let me know in the comments and I will make sure it gets pinned to my
1000 Books Pinterest board and get it on the
google map. And if you are thinking of adding the program, please stop at
this blog post for resources, history, research to support grant or funding requests and more!
In this series, I am looking at sustainability in our work. The first post addressed some larger issues and thoughts about costs of ongoing projects followed by a post on grant fails Today, let's consider the sustainability factor of successful grant-funded projects.So what are key components to create sustainability in grant-funded projects?
First don't write it if you can't see a way to sustain the project, keep it fresh or easily make changes to evolve it to meet changing community needs. Taking a pile of money, creating a thing and letting it languish seems to be wasteful. If, in your grant planning, you figure what you need to keep the initiative or service going beyond the grant, it means two things: the grant start-up money is well-used to kick things off and you actually need the service or initiative enough to justify putting future general budget funds into keeping it fresh.
Grant WinsHere are two examples of sustainability thinking we
used in creating and thinking about projects we wanted to continue beyond their initial grant cycle.
2nd Grade Library StarsBased on meetings with our LMC colleagues who suggested we bring in one grade level for an introduction to the library, we decided to reach out to all second graders and offer a field trip adventure at our Main Library location. The biggest expense for this was going to be transportation - only one school is in walking distance of our Youth Services Department.
We wrote a Community Foundation grant for buses for $1000 and looked at our program budget for the future to fund the project in ensuing years. If we didn't book three outside performers, we would have that money.
The tours were a huge hit with the teachers, kids and staff. The worth of them was so apparent that the schools funded the buses the second year. Now we are looking at adding seventh grade and kindergarten field trips annually and the schools have agreed to split the bus costs. This makes these visits sustainable for both organizations. And because of the impact of the visits and the positives that have resulted, if we needed to fund raise to keep them going, I believe we would have no trouble in gaining support.
Baby Book BeesWe offer our 1000 Books program to children ages 1-5 but really wanted to catch families with their children from birth. So we developed a pre-1000 BksB4K efforts asking parents to read 100 books to their baby before their first birthday. We decided that offering a little bib at sign-up with the library name and a book as a culminating incentive would be swell.
We wrote a Target grant to fund these two pieces and we received that grant - for twice the amount we asked for! This allowed us to fund the effort beyond a year and get better pricing on the bibs and books. And how will we maintain this effort beyond this grant funding? We plan to enfold this initiative into the funds for 1000 Books (that original $7000 raised). Once this money is expended, we'll look into using existing programming money to continue or do a special fundraising appeal.
I think, dear readers, you are starting to see how thread of funding for projects needs to be worked into the warp and weave of regular budgets for programs and collections if sustainability is a goal.
Next post, we'll leave special projects behind and look at the sustainability of our programs. See you then!
Part 1Part 2Part 4
Graphic courtesy of Pixabay
