Village Van Event Fundraiser

Help Us Gift Books to Our Community!

Thanks to tax deductible gifts from many of you, we were able to launch our nonprofit arm, the Village Van, in the fall of 2023 with a mission to take the spirit of the Village Well out of the shop to places where books, authors and illustrators are less accessible.

Studies have shown that reading strengthens the brain, increases empathy and reduces stress. And what we learn reading offline on paper is more likely to be retained. Kids everywhere need access to books to grow up healthy and stress-free and kids in neighborhoods where stress is higher need them more than anyone.

For our first project, we partnered with Ready, Set, Read!, a nonprofit that enhances early childhood literacy and provides training materials to parents and educators. We identified four local authors who presented how their books can be used as classroom teaching resources and donated 360 copies of their books for Ready, Set, Read! to distribute to 90 LAUSD early childhood education centers.

In May 2024, our next opportunity came from our customer Virginia Lee, who works for the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. She connected us to Weigand Elementary in Watts and we brainstormed ways to support with the Village Van. At the principal’s direction, we sought out a local author with a bilingual book and partnered with Naibe Reynoso, publisher of Con Todo press, to read her most recent title, How To Stuff a Piñata: Cómo Rellenar una Piñata, to the students. The children loved the book and some even hugged Naibe at the end, telling her that they wanted to become authors, too. Before we left, we put a signed book into the hands of each of Weigand’s 105 second and third graders.

Our pilot events with Ready, Set, Read! and Weigand Elementary are prime examples of the type of impact we want to create. But they’re just a drop in the bucket. We want to do so much more of this type of work, but we need your help to maximize our capacity.

Will you help us raise $10,000 so that we can program more events like this? When you give, you contribute to our local community and put the incredible power of books into the hands of eager readers and educators!