Books from Raising Literacy Australia in Adelaide enriching lives of children, especially those in foster care
Specially selected books for children distributed by the thousands by Raising Literacy Australia, from the Adelaide suburb of Norwood, included those published by its own Little Book Press.
Images courtesy Raising Literacy Australia
Raising Literacy Australia, founded in 2006 and based in the Adelaide suburb of Norwood, aiming to enrich children’s lives through literacy had gifted more than two million books to Australian families by 2022.
Since 2015, the non-for-profit organisation had also provided more than 100,000 books to vulnerable children in foster/kinship care. Raising Literacy Australia delivered learning-age-appropriate “book bags” to every student in an approved government preschool.
Raising Literacy Australia provided new parents with their own “book bag” to plant the seed for their child early development. The packs were delivered by CaFHS (Child and Family Health Service) nurses as a learning resource for the newborn and an icebreaker between the nurse and mother.
Raising Literacy Australia’s work with vulnerable and at-risk children became the “cornerstone” of the organisation. Through the Read to Me initiative, the organisation worked closely with several government departments to identify children needing support and providing personalised libraries for thousands of children across South Australia, many them foster/kinship care. The books were especially selected and personalised to ensure they reflect the individual living situation of every child. The value of giving foster children their own books took on special significance because, in many cases, they may be the only things they possessed.
Raising Literacy Australia gained high-profile ambassadors such as Kate Ellis, a former federal government minister for the portfolios of early childhood and childcare. Ellis was appointed in 2021 by the South Australian government to head an early learning taskforce, also involving Raising Literacy Australia. Other high-profile ambassadors included Channel 7 television news presenter Rosanna Mangiarelli, Australian Olympic marathon runner Jessica Stenson (nee Trengove) and children’s book illustrator Mandy Foot. Through her drawings, Foot brought life to children’s books from 2008, including titles for Little Book Press, the publishing arm of Raising Literacy Australia.
Aside from having its Little Book Press books printed in Australia, due to the high cost of printing domestically, little else was outsourced by Raising Literacy Australia. But even with cost-saving measures, the organisation struggled to deliver programmes like the Book Gifting initiative in preschools to the level it wanted . A lack of resources was blocking Raising Literacy Australia’s goal to take in programmes Australia-wide.
With a cutback in its government funding in 2022, the organisation relied on corporate partnership and donations in its race against time. With 90% of a child’s brain formed by the time they are three years old, Raising Literacy Australia feared that it could be too late for the children to catch up by the time they reached five.
