Home Libraries for Low Income Children

Literacy Partners offers free adult literacy classes to help low-income and immigrant parents develop the literacy and language skills they need to succeed in today’s world. Our students are often most motivated to attend our classes by their desire to help their young children succeed academically. Having books in the home is highly correlated with early reading proficiency and school readiness, but our students, and their children, typically own few, if any, books of their own. To help parents fuel their children’s love of reading and enhance their school readiness, we provide our students with home libraries of 15 age- and culturally appropriate books for each of their children through our Books of Their Own program.

Literacy Partners Supports Parents

Most of our students grew up in homes without books and were never read to when they were children. Our trained teachers work with them in class over many weeks to practice reading children’s books and to coach them on how to make family reading a daily habit.

Results

Literacy Partners addresses the two biggest factors predicting reading proficiency and school reading among young children: the number of books in the home and the frequency of parents reading with their children. The children of our students benefit immediately: they demonstrate nearly double the rate of growth on preschool assessments of early childhood development compared to their peers in the same class whose parents were not in our program.

Supporting Books of Their Own

The program is offered in partnership with the leading publishers and relies on the generous support of foundations and many individual donors. Please consider a donation of children’s books to help us grow the program to reach more low-income and immigrant families.  By providing books, you will have a lasting impact on families throughout New York City by ​helping parents build a better future for themselves and their children.

We are committed to only providing high-quality, diverse, educational, and entertaining books to our families. With this in mind, we can only accept new books. We cannot accept books that are dirty, damaged, have markings, wear or discoloration, or that have explicit language or content.

For more information about Books of Their Own, including questions about what we accept, or for book drive inquiries, please contact us at volunteer@literacypartners.org.

Interested in volunteering with Books of Their Own?
Visit our portal below!