Season's Greetings: An Update from the field from MagLiteracy.org
By John Mennell, founder, MagLiteracy.org
Editor's Note: Earlier this year, the Pandemic Roundtable invited John Mennell, the founder of MagLiteracy.org to come and talk about his organization and the progress they've made during the pandemic in distributing magazines to the needy. Since then we've been in regular communication with him and received the note and pictures you will see below the fold.
As terrible as 2020 has been, what incredible success this organization has had in expanding their mission of bringing literacy through magazines.
An Update From The Field
Our new Mississippi MagLiteracy.org team covers the ground from Memphis to the Delta. They were inspired by Samir’s invite to Act 9 and it’s been made possible by the unstoppable Estella Dean and her daughter Courtney.
Thanks to steady Barnes and Noble newsstand supplies we were able to ship a pallet of beautiful mags to the Delta from our Ohio Literacy Bank warehouse to get them started. They are already partnering with community orgs and the large Mid-South Food Bank in Memphis to feed children and families hungry to read in areas of the USA faced with the deepest historical poverty.
Estella mentions engaging Ole Miss and I can tell you that high school and college students fuel our successes in Madison, Wisconsin and here in Columbus. A group of Columbus high school students bundles mags for curbside food bank distribution. A club of 30 students to is already forming at OSU and assisting with our B&N store pickups here.
Following on the 100,000 National Wildlife Federation kids’ mags that Quad delivered to launch our warehouse operations at the Atrium Company, we received 200,000 Cricket Media magazines. We are getting regular support from Kent Johnson at Highlights Magazine Publishing and Trusted Media Brands product via Milwaukee. The weekly Pandemic Roundtable helped expand our voice and got us noticed. We recently began to receive pallets from publishers like Dance Media via PubWorx. Other children’s and regional publishers like the Dispatch Company, and Meredith are now sending us magazines to distribute.
I had the privilege and pleasure to receive some mentoring from Bonnie Kintzer of Trusted Media Brands earlier this year who emphasized the importance of focusing on high needs in middle America. We took that to heart and with the always unflinching support of Joel Quadracci of Quad Graphics and his team, and with Krifka Steffey as tip of the retail spear at Barnes and Noble, we are getting in some good trouble supporting thousands upon thousands of eager readers. Many of our readers have had zero books or magazines in their home up until this point.
Tonight, I stood on a hill and wished upon two converged planets that 2021 will be the year that we all together plot a celebrate the enormous unique power of magazines for sharing the literacy love. This is our moonshot. Godspeed.
