Rowan Childs - Madison Reading Project

On Building Up Youth: "We want to make sure every kid is excited and sees themselves on the cover or as the main character."

Often we take the skills we have for granted.  We want this and that, but rarely take the time to have gratitude for all that we have.  I'm not talking material things, I am speaking of opportunities and education.  As business owners, we know how to read.

Did you know that many children have challenges achieving the literacy needed to understand the other subjects in school?  Rowan Childs saw this need and built a non-profit to help children get access to books to read.  Not just any books.  These are books that kids want to read.  Madison Reading Project is a non-profit that offers free books and literacy resources to children to ignite a love of reading.

The beautiful thing is Madison Reading Project has blossomed from a small startup to a non-profit that continues to serve thousands of books to children.  This is truly an amazing success story and a story that is making the world a better place.

Enjoy!

Visit Rowan at: https://www.madisonreadingproject.com/

Sponsors:

Calls On Call Extraordinary Answering Service, phone answering for small businesses: https://callsoncall.com

Some videos have been recorded with Riverside: https://www.riverside.fm/?utm_campaign=campaign_5&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=rewardful&via=james-kademan

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 Starting a reading pilot program

04:15 Addressing literacy challenges

07:50 Finding support and gathering books

13:52 Benefits of being a smaller team

14:32 Navigating diverse board challenges

19:27 Building trust with the community

22:38 Offering diverse book options

26:55 Selecting books for community programs

30:36 Lessons from volunteering at food bank

33:00 Donating books through our program

37:20 Giving out books during holidays

39:20 Paper fashion design contest

43:41 Deciding to make paper dresses

45:51 Building Awareness and Finding Volunteers

Podcast Transcription:

James Kademan [00:00:00]:

You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggles, stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found at https://drawincustomers.com.  We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie, and today we are welcoming, slash, preparing to learn from Rowan Childs of Madison Reading Project. Rowan, I'm super excited to be here.

Rowan Childs [00:00:32]:

Thank you. Welcome.

James Kademan [00:00:34]:

This is amazing. We got. I mean, people can see we got whatever, 5 billion books behind us and all that stuff. So tell us the story. What is Madison Reading Project?

Rowan Childs [00:00:44]:

Yeah. So we are a nonprofit. We provide all kinds of literacy resources, whether they are physical books, digital resources, and our wonderful stuff. We're here to support adults and children in support of them learning how to read in support of them re engaging or engaging in reading and love of books, ultimately to help raise literacy rates in Dane county and now just in Sauk county as well. Yes. That's a brand new thing.

James Kademan [00:01:27]:

Wow.

Rowan Childs [00:01:27]:

Yeah.

James Kademan [00:01:28]:

All right.

Rowan Childs [00:01:29]:

But we're really here to make sure that kids have their books and to help remove some of those barriers that they have. So whether it's been from the very beginning through what we do today, we do that in a way more sophisticated way than how we started, but it really is to try and provide really high quality materials that children and adults can keep. So we want to make sure that kids are excited about the books and about reading and that they ultimately are inspired to want to hang on to those and to continue to read and love books.

James Kademan [00:02:08]:

Nice. I love it. I love it. It's so interesting because when you give me address to the place, I just follow gps. And I was like, it's just going to be some warehouse or something like that. But this is a very bright. It's vibrant, it's welcoming. It's not just some dingy, like, there's the books in the back kind of thing.

Rowan Childs [00:02:25]:

Not at all.

James Kademan [00:02:25]:

So this is cool. This is very nice.

Rowan Childs [00:02:28]:

Good. That's how we want everyone to feel.

James Kademan [00:02:30]:

Yeah. I love it. Let's go back to the way back when, when you first started this 12 years ago, you said, yep, that is a while. We got pandemic. We got.

Rowan Childs [00:02:41]:

Man.

James Kademan [00:02:42]:

I feel like every few years there's some kind of a crisis. So I don't remember all the crisis we've been through. But what triggered you to start Madison Reading Project?

Rowan Childs [00:02:51]:

Yeah, I had just helped my own son re engage in reading. He liked reading things at home, but not so much the books that he was reading at school. And after I helped him figure that out, it just got me thinking about what if I hadn't understood the teacher who had messaged me at home? Or what if they hadn't messaged me? It took me some time and resources to figure that out. So I started just researching and couldn't really find what I was looking for, which wasn't necessarily volunteering on helping kids how to read, it was the other piece of it. And so I spent some time interviewing at some schools and some other after school locations and no one really knew of something of what I was describing and eventually had this idea of potentially how I this pilot program idea. But I wanted to find a pilot program location that would be smaller versus starting somewhere that had 200 kids. So I eventually found a program at Salvation army on Darbo drive that had 30 kids. And Zarbo Drive area is a pretty impoverished area.

Rowan Childs [00:04:15]:

And the director at that time said he was actually trying to help the kids with homework, but they were behind in reading and he was trying to engage kids in reading. So it was this perfect sort of timing. And the week that we met, the Race to Equity report came out, which was a five year data set on everything that you kind of need for the proof of why literacy is so important. So anything on the actual literacy rates of every school in the county, comparing not just districts and schools, but also third grade reading levels, fifth grade high school in poverty rates, and also race, comparing kids who are white and black or Hispanic. And some of the differences not only were maybe 10 or 15%, but some of the schools were up to 40% differences. And that's just heartbreaking. Still, every time I talk about it, it makes me just really sad because if you can't read whether you're in third grade, you. You're just always going to be behind.

Rowan Childs [00:05:28]:

Ultimately, you might still be able to struggle through school, but what kind of job are you going to be able to get or can even get your driver's license? You know, it's just snowballs from there.

James Kademan [00:05:40]:

Yeah.

Rowan Childs [00:05:42]:

And Will, who was the director at the time, was really adamant that if you can't read, it's just going to be a really difficult life or could lead to a life of incarceration. And so the two of us were very passionate about trying to figure something out. And then the last piece was the funding.

James Kademan [00:06:05]:

It's a pretty big piece, kind of.

Rowan Childs [00:06:07]:

I had no money to put towards my pilot program. Someone I had mentioned what I wanted to do, said you really need to have the right money to do the pilot program. Correctly.

James Kademan [00:06:19]:

Thanks.

Rowan Childs [00:06:20]:

Yes. And wrote me a check for $1,000. Oh. Which is really nice. That way I could actually purchase the right materials to make the program the pilot. Correct.

James Kademan [00:06:32]:

Wow.

Rowan Childs [00:06:33]:

So that was the last piece for that. So we did a three month pilot program that went really well. The parents, the kids were really engaged and excited about clearing out some of the old books that nobody wanted to read, putting in new books that the kids helped so select. The teachers were excited to have new materials so successful that they asked me to come back and do it again.

James Kademan [00:06:59]:

All right.

Rowan Childs [00:07:00]:

Which we did. And one thing led to another. But it definitely, as we stayed and sort of kept learning from that, that really was the beginning of learning that. Absolutely kids do want to learn how to read. They absolutely do want to read great books and to select books. And there's a lot of pride in being able to select their own books. And we stayed at that location exclusively for nearly two years, just learning with the kids and the parents and the teachers really what we did or didn't want to do or what we could do before we were going to scale at all. And that was great.

Rowan Childs [00:07:50]:

And the other piece was, how are we going to fund all of this apart from that initial check? And while we were doing that initial pilot program in that first year, people just started giving me boxes of their nice books that they had never used or just unsolicited. They're like, oh, oh, by the way, I have a box of books for you. Like, oh, thank you so much. Or people were asking me how they could donate some money because they loved what they had heard what I was doing, whether I really knew them or not, till the point where I had a basement full of books in my house. And I was like, this seems like we have something here. So we have definitely children in a population in Madison initially that absolutely would love to have more books and programs. We have people who absolutely seem to love books and want to provide books....