I also promote philanthropy. Each year I believe more strongly that we all need to challenge ourselves to find ways to be more generous and giving.

Wouldn’t it be great to somehow combine reading and giving? Hmm…

Then I heard about an initiative launched by The Pearson Foundation and Penguin Young Readers Group called We Give Books, and I was excited to learn more.

What a wonderful idea! Read a book. Give a book.

So last week, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, when the Pearson Foundation gathered together a group of bloggers, authors* and others to announce the launch of the site, We Give Books, I was happy to attend.

*Including Pulitzer Prize winning author, Dave Barry!

How does it work?

Choose a Campaign

Read Books

Share

Here’s the gist: We Give Books encourages parents or caregivers to read with their kids and then donate a book to a charity selected by the reader. Read a book, give a book. For every story you read on the site with (or without!) your child, they donate a book! The reader’s only obligation (if you even want to call it that) is to read the online book. Pearson/Penguin then donates the book directly to the charity you and your child selected.

These are some of the folks behind this initiative.

How easy is this?

1) Choose the charity

2) Read a book

3) Click to donate

For every book read on the site, the Pearson Foundation will donate a book to a worthy charity (selected by the reader(s)) of the book(s) from among those listed on the site).

Just give it a try. The site is very easy to navigate. Your youngest kids can participate in turning the pages of the book. In fact, I recommend that you get your kids involved from the start. Tell them a little about the charities, let them choose which one they like most, then let them pick the first book. I bet you’ll read more than a few (and then donate more than a few).

Mark Nieker, President of the Pearson Foundation, believes “We Give Books gives parents an opportunity to read with their children, and its innovation is that it surrounds reading with those important conversations that can start a young person on a life of giving.”

You can still have that special, quality time with your child in your lap, reading a story but now it’s interactive and helps other kids! This site puts an interesting twist on story time in our hi-tech world.

The only thing that I believe could make this even better and more current? If they had an iPad app for it.

I’ll bet it’s just a matter of time.

Visit We Give Books. And let me know what you think.

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I like paper. Not in a Dunder-Mifflin kind of way. No, I like writing papers. When I open my mailbox and see a handwritten envelope with an address label of one of my friends, I smile, walk quickly back into the house, put the stack of mail on the counter, then pull out the special envelope and put it at my place at our kitchen table.

I delight in its existence. I can’t wait to open it.

But I do.

I make a cup of tea, kick off my shoes and slowly sit in my chair, eagerly awaiting the discovery of the contents of the special envelope.

“Mmm…nice stationery,” I think as I flip over the card.

Yeah. It’s a moment for me.

When I was a teen, my friends and I loved to discover beautiful papers or fun cards. We wrote letters to each other even though we lived less than a few miles away. We wrote to each other at summer camp. My favorite stationery was a fold-over Snoopy note card that served as its own envelope. Fold the bottom up and the top down, then turn it around and boom! There’s your address box. Sort of like a postcard, sort of like an envelope.

Later,

when I was engaged to be married, I thoroughly enjoyed selecting our wedding announcements but, by that time, I had moved well past Snoopy to a very traditional, formal style.

Then, when Soapbox Dad and I were newlyweds, I remember having difficulty deciding on holiday cards. He wanted formal, straightforward holiday cards. I wanted either cleanly designed or cutesy cards with gushy sentiments like, “Peaceful New Year” or “Joyful Christmas” or “Fuzzy Warm Feelings.” We usually settled on some inoffensive compromise card with toned down but sincere sentiments.

Then we had kids. And the need to announce their births. I remember spending way too much time selecting our first child’s birth announcements.

Soapbox Dad and I actually visited a store in our town that had samples of birth announcements pasted into over-sized, unwieldy scrapbooks that weighed about fifty pounds each. We hoisted several books onto a huge desk and slowly thumbed through each book, carefully turning the pages, letting our imaginations replace the name on the card with our daughter’s name, which at that point was still an unknown.

After weeks of deliberating and seeking advice from our parents, we selected announcements that, in retrospect, were probably more formal than our family’s current lifestyle and a little more to our parents’ standards than our own.

We played it safe.

After the kids were born, the next great stationary challenge was the annual holiday card. If we ever considered being overly formal and sending William Arthur or Crane, I don’t remember. The driving force was our desire to share a photo of our baby girl.  So the first criterion for the cards was the ability to hold a photo.  Options were extremely limited.  In fact, the first year we just used a traditional holiday card and inserted a photo of our little girl.  As soon as we had two kids, we found a card style that worked.  We used double stick tape to attach a photo of the kids to each card.

The most challenging part of the holiday card had less to do with the style or the sentiment of the card and far more to do with successfully capturing a lovely photograph of two smiling children.

Photographers would use bubbles, toys, puppets, jokes, and other creative means to try to get a good photograph of the kids.  I would stand off to the side and try to laugh, giggle, make faces, or do whatever I could to get both of them to smile at the same time.  All we needed was one good shot…

Eventually I tried to take the pictures myself.  Heaven knows why, but I thought a seemingly impulsive moment might be more effective.  If I could just wait for good afternoon light when the kids were both in good moods and/or just had a snack and turn a quiet afternoon into a photo shoot, I was bound to get a good shot. Sometimes it worked and other times…

Keep in mind, this was back in the days of 35mm photography.  Film in cameras.  Shooting three or four rolls of film not knowing whether any of those pictures would be suitable for a holiday card.  Then taking the rolls of film to the store to be developed, waiting for them to be shipped back, flipping madly through pack after pack, hoping and praying for that one special shot.  If I happened to be lucky enough to have one good one, then I would have to sort through the negatives to find the shot, go back to the store to order a hundred or more copies of the picture and wait for those to come back. Argh!

And which card would I use?  Who cares?! I would use whatever folding paper could hold that *$% picture that I finally had and would actually send to friends and family before the holidays were over!

Whew.

There had to be a better way.

Enter the joys of modern technology.

Cue confetti, happy music and smiling faces.

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