This past weekend at the People for Education conference, I ran into a lovely woman I had been a part of a network in East York/East Toronto. Virginia worked at one of the largest and most diverse schools in the city of Toronto. One of the pieces we had done together was a community consultation for a grant the coalition was writing. We decided that the experts on families with children 0 – 6 were grade one students. With that in mind we went into her world -a large multicultural school – and conducted consultation with all of the grade one students. We used a popular icebreaker called “buses” or “lifeboats” to collect demographics from the children and then moved into an interactive activity of planting seeds with children while talking to them about what plants need to grow and that even cows do better with producing milk when farmers play music to them. With that interactive educational piece in place, we asked children to draw pictures of “What children need to grow”. We received a wonderful outpouring – colourful drawings from fruits and vegetables to libraries, and from bigger apartments to waterslides. Kids were more than willing to help set a vision for the kinds of neighbourhoods they felt were necessary to grow healthy children.

It has been years since I have seen Virginia and I was delighted to touch base with her to find out what she is doing these days. As a retired school librarian she is now caught up in a beautiful piece of work called the Children’s Book Bank. Located in Regent Park, the book bank is a place for children to go to have stories read to them and each time they visit they leave with a book to keep for themselves. How exciting is that!

This had me thinking about other book and literacy projects that I know about that more famous people have been involved in. Canada’s Ken Dryden shared part of his life story with a group of us attending a celebration of Social Development Canada money going into three large projects in Toronto. (One of them was the Families Are Important Resources project that I coordinated for three years.) He grew up in a family where his dad, Murray Dryden, started a philanthropic connection with Africa called Sleeping Children Around the World, and distributed bed kits, and when possible books, to communities. Or John Wood who was a big shot at Microsoft and left that career to begin a charity called Room to Read after hiking in the mountains of Nepal and feeling inspired to bring the joy of books to a beautiful yet under resourced country. People who stepped beyond their daily lives to take action.

I am curious about the connection between literacy, activism and community development. I know that people such as Virginia, Ken and John choose to turn a part of their lives over to sharing the joy of books with people both here in Toronto and around the world. But how is that transformative?

Judith Bernhard, director of the Masters of Arts in Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University, shared a story about how empowerment work was linked to literacy in a class called Families and Educational Equity. She asked the class what was the letter Frèire often began teaching literacy to the people in communities? After several guesses, she shared it was the letter “O”. Why “O”? Because he wanted to begin with dialogues in communities about oppression.

Here is a quick piece from Freire about how we relate to our worlds: Paulo Freire – Before the word

As a child, books were a place of refuge for me. They lifted me up from the daily concerns of growing up in a complex world. As a young adult, I know that reading helped to transform my life as I became aware of, and competent with, the language of feminism. I learned the words to help me understand the experiences of my life. I continue to grow and evolve as I learn about the language of empowerment through things such as the pedagogy of the oppressed.

I get excited when someone shares a new book with me like The World Café: Shaping our futures through Conversations That Matter by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs and the World Café Community. A book can provide me a doorway into a new world from within the safety of my own home. Armed with the new tools I gain access to through book, I can go into the world and begin to transform the world one conversation at a time. Or for people like Virginia, by putting one book into the hands of one child at a time.

What about you?