See Beautiful Grant Applicant: Read and Right

The feature below is brought to you by Read and Right, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about our giving initiatives, please click here.
 
To learn more about the featured organization, please visit their website here.

Impacting children’s attitudes about race and representation

The summer of 2020 proved to be a racial awakening for our country. Although systemic racism has been prevalent in our society for centuries, horrific acts of police brutality against Black people were now seen by millions. More and more stories of injustice unmasked and recharged the dire need for social change. The time to speak up and stand up was right in front of us.

We (Asia Brown and Abby Stolz), two coworkers and the cofounders of Read and Right, both felt committed to doing our part in the fight against racism. In our efforts and research, we both felt strongly that racism was a learned act. As we continued these conversations, it was evident there was a lack of diverse representation of the books we read as children. These younger years are developmentally crucial for racial awareness. White children need to see diverse characters for positive attitudes about race and BIPOC children deserve to be represented in the literature they learn from.

With this in mind, we founded Read and Right, an approved 501(c)(3) organization that strives for racial equality and opportunity within the education system by providing the necessary resources for children to accept and respect all races. Our continued goal is to donate books to elementary schools that encourage positive conversations about race and feature important Black leaders, pioneers and protagonists. We also donate school supplies to the underserved Black students in our community that aid equal opportunity to succeed. Based out of the Atlanta area, our efforts have started out in the Atlanta Public Schools, serving grades PK-3.

After our launch in June 2020, we began collecting monetary donations as well as books with diverse characters. We received an outpouring of support from people who shared a similar passion of equal representation and positive conversations about race. With the generosity we received, we began to prepare for our first donation at the start of the 2020-21 school year.

Despite various obstacles and the relentless pandemic, in October we were able to donate over 250+ books to four different Atlanta Public elementary Schools in addition to school supplies we had collected. We also coordinated a reading guide that was passed along to each school, to help teachers and media specialists guide their students into these honest and raw conversations about race. All four schools (Springdale, Mary Lin, William Boyd and Harper Archer) greatly appreciated the donations and it only fueled our drive to expand our reach.

With our goals of stretching our reach to different communities, we understand it’s time to grow our exposure. Our Instagram page (@readandrightatl) has been continuously growing and has tremendously helped our efforts in receiving donations, educating and informing the public and updating our followers on our progress. We are ready for the next steps of our journey.

We understand Read and Right’s efforts can seem small in the fight against systemic racism, but the thought of having an impact on children's attitudes about race and representation motivates us.  We hope that our once, small nonprofit will continue to positively affect the lives of many children to come who will be able to look back and remember the diverse books they were able to have in their classrooms and libraries.

Submitted by Abby Stolz

Co-founder, Read and Right