“There’s a magic that happens in this room,” says Anne Preston, Chair of the literacy program known as County Kids Read. She is talking about the space provided by St. Mary Magdalene Church and the volunteers who work to make the program a motivating force in children’s lives.

This past June, I saw the magic in action.

Two fourth-grade classes walked down the street from PECI. They chattered and waved at cars and shouted at them to honk.

At the parish Hall behind Saint Mary Magdalene Church, County Kids Read volunteer Catherine O’Brien was there to greet them. The nine-year-olds were enjoined to a respectfully quiet entrance, and a library-like hush fell upon the fifty-odd kids, their teachers, and the parent chaperones, who filed in and gathered on the carpet of a basement room lined with bookshelves, featuring multiple copies of shiny new volumes, organized by genre and subject.

Ms. O’Brien begins: “County Kids Read is like a mashup between a bookstore and a library. You get to choose a book. But you don’t have to bring it back. It’s yours. It’s a gift.”

She introduces a variety of books. Her theme is nonfiction activities for summer break. There are science books and nature books; books about fishing and games, and cooking.

A hand goes up. A boy asks, “can I get that cookbook?”

“Of course,” says Ms. O’Brien.

“Yessss!” answers the boy, making that fist clenching gesture, as if he had just scored a goal for the soccer team.

“Is there more than one cookbook?” asks another boy, anxiously. The answer is yes.

The magic is real. How did it come to be?

Ms. Preston tells the story.

“When I first came here over twenty years ago, I was one of the literacy coordinators for the Toronto District School Board. So, of course, what I did was look at the reading scores here. And I said, ‘that can’t be: this is an English-speaking population. How is it so low?’

“And then I realized what’s going on: the high numbers of low income families. It’s very, very real and it still is very real, even after the twenty years I’ve been here. And what an eye-opener that was for me, because it’s invisible, not in your face like it is in the city.”

And so she found her calling. “We try to address the link between poverty and literacy. One of the keys to literacy acquisition is having books in the home. It’s all about the books.” Research shows that being able to choose and own a book means that a child will read it.

But how to make this happen? How to find the children who need to have a book of their own? County Kids Read involves community partners: “We wanted to work with other organizations who are focused on low-income families and children, so we could layer literacy into their programs. That’s key to what we do.”

The program engages with the community through relationships with other organizations. Their 14 community partners have constituencies served by the literacy efforts of County Kids Read.

They strive to foster a true understanding of each agency’s needs, hosting representatives for presentations and assigning a particular volunteer to work with each group, developing a relationship. Keeping track of rapidly changing population statistics — in collaboration with the County Foundation — is another aspect of the work.

The final piece of the puzzle was a room of their own, donated and maintained by the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in the basement of the parish hall. Lovingly refurbished by volunteers from the church, the space allows County Kids Read staff to host young readers and provide support, modelling reading habits for both parents and children. “The whole thing about this program is it is intentional. It is intent on getting books to children.”

There are many moving parts. As the agency grew from a small, grassroots group into a recognized pillar of the community, it has developed as an organization, distributing responsibilities among a board of directors and some twenty volunteers. Recently they created a framework for the organization’s records and practices to carry it into the future as personnel shifts and changes.

The organization stays on top of grant applications, shifting interests, and make sure that the shelves stay stocked. “600 books come out of this collection every month!” notes Ms. Preston.

All of this depends upon a posse of volunteers, not only for each school session, but also at summertime events like the Farmer’s Market, the Reading Round-Up with the PELC, Hillier Park Day, and Athol Day.

And, of course, it depends on funding. Ms. Preston explains, “the Huff Family Fund and the Municipal Grant have been very generous to us all these years, but we’re not a big league player, we don’t do Trillium, we don’t do the big grants. So this program runs on donations.” Donor management “is huge,” so much so that a specialist is on staff.

The mission of County Kids Read is to ensure the fundamental human right to literacy, which creates the right to a brighter future. “Just think of the power of a book. Just today a little boy left and he said, ‘I wish I could come here every day’,” said Ms. Preston.

Through hard work, a lot of magic does happen here.

County Kids read will host a 15th year birthday celebration for families and children on Saturday, August 24th in Benson Park from 10 to 12. For more information, see: countykidsread.ca