Join Total Equity Now (“TEN”) and their amazing community partners, volunteers, and supporters have worked hard to:
- Promote reading via Literacy Across Harlem Day (#RockThoseReads);
- Collect and distribute nearly 5,000 new and like-new books to neighbors in homeless shelters and adult-education programs;
- Develop the first-ever Literacy Across Harlem Map; and
- Connect young people, families, and other community members with Harlem’s local bookstores, reading-friendly cafes, and adult and family literacy programs.
How To Participate in Visit Your Harlem Library Day
- On June 7th, arrive at any of Harlem’s 10 libraries between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. and pick up a “Harlem Library Passport” from a Total Equity Now volunteer. Just as you might receive a special stamp for each country you visited if you were traveling with a real passport, our volunteers will greet you outside each library and award you a special sticker!
- Families or individual community members who collect all 10 stickers (or, if no one succeeds in collecting all 10, the greatest number of stickers) will receive public recognition!
- Explore each library’s facilities, say hello to any librarians you encounter, and don’t forget to pick up a monthly calendar of events (each library branch features a different menu of opportunities)!
If your family, school, youth-development organization, civic association, faith-based institution, or other group would like to participate as a team, please email them: VisitYourLibrary@TotalEquityNowHarlem.org.
“Pan-Harlem Like Pura”
This year’s Visit Your Harlem Library Day is dedicated to Pura Belpré (1899-1982), the New York Public Library system’s first Latina librarian and a pioneer in making sure children of color in Harlem had access to books and activities that reflected the richness of their cultural backgrounds.
Over the course of her career, from east to west (“pan-Harlem”), Pura gave the invaluable gift of reading and storytelling to countless Harlem children, serving at the Hamilton Grange Library (in West Harlem); the 115th Street Library (in Central Harlem); the 135th Street Library (also in Central Harlem, where Pura actually worked with Arturo Schomburg, namesake of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which later opened in that same building); and the Aguilar Library (in East Harlem, El Barrio, Pura’s home of many years until she passed away.
To learn more about Pura:
- Pick up a copy of Pura’s biography, Lisa Sánchez González’s The Stories I Read to the Children, at La Casa Azul Bookstore (143 E. 103rd Street between Park and Lexington Avenues);
- Read Pura’s Wikipedia entry; and
- See why the American Library Association annually awards a medal in Pura’s honor.
2nd Annual Visit Your Harlem Library Day
Theme: “Pan-Harlem Like Pura,” Saturday, June 7, 2014
10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Support Their Work: www.totalequitynowharlem.org/donate
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