The Big Give Christmas Challenge: Shared Reading for Everyone

It's the last day of The Big Give Christmas Challenge, where we're hoping to raise £20,000 to extend our shared reading projects even further. If you donate online as close as possible to 10am today, your donation could be doubled by match funding from The Garfield Weston Foundation - no matter if it's £1 or £100.

Each week our Project Workers across the UK share stories and poems aloud with hundreds of beneficiaries of all ages, from all different backgrounds and walks of life. As one Project Worker reads with people living with dementia in a care home, another shares a book with people from the local community in a library. While storytime sessions take place with toddlers and young children and their parents and carers, a shared reading group is running elsewhere in a workplace setting. The people we read with are as varied as the stories we read, with each person taking something special and unique to them away from their shared reading experience:

'It's good. I've never read like that before - I mean I've read aloud but I've never paid much attention to what I've been reading - you know thinking about the meaning of it and that. But this is good and we've got all that from this little story!'

“I've found a real sense of community and belonging in my group.  It's helped me to come out of isolation when not very well.”

"[The group] is like sitting around a fire and telling stories to each other - a way of binding us together."

We're currently running a workplace project in Plus Dane Housing in Merseyside, where employees are benefitting from time spent sharing reading together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05IWRBDFITs&w=420&h=315

Any size donation is hugely appreciated - go to TRO's profile on The Big Give Website and click the 'Donate Online Now' button or click here to donate directly as near to 10am as possible today (Saturday 6th December) and your donation could be doubled in aid of helping to further the reading revolution.