Most summers, QLNB supports and promotes family and community literacy by showing up - tents and tarps, boxes of books to read and borrow, writing materials and singing games and healthy snacks and laying about in the sunshine (or huddled away from the rain) talking with kids and adults about stories and words and "how's your week going?"
This year, things have been different.
Our first change in plans came when we recognized there would be no New Brunswick community event storytents because New Brunswick wasn't having community events. In place of event tents, we chose to deliver a package of books, authored by New Brunswickers, to little free libraries in or near-by those south-western NB communities our 2020 event tents would have served.
While these gift-packs vary, most include seven small picture books for children and families published by the University of New Brunswick Early Childhood Centre, an NB authored board, picture, youth fiction and youth non-fiction book, and a fiction and non-fiction book for adults (e.g., David Adams Richard's Mercy Among the Children or Nicholas Guitard's Waterfalls of New Brunswick: A Guide).
We kicked off this project by placing a book pack in Red Head's Little Free library (pictured above), as well as stocking four laundry-room libraries in the Roxbury Drive public housing neighbourhood.
Major funding for this project comes from a New Brunswick Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture Literacy Promotion Grant. Additional support has come from the New Brunswick Department of Social Development, a Literacy Coalition of New Brunswick - Peter Gzowski Invitational (PGI) grant, and various private and corporate donations.
P.s., for more information on books, borrowing and libraries in the current context, check out New Brunswick Public Libraries's COVID-19 and Your Library and, from earlier this year, a CBC webstory Is it safe to borrow library books? Your COVID-19 questions answered.
