What does BookStorm do?

Our mission is to positively impact the lives of under-served children by promoting literacy

We help promote literacy by collecting children's books and donating them to the under-served children in the Bay Area and beyond.

Since its inception, BookStorm has collected and donated thousands of books to local organizations like the Ravenswood School Foundation, Ravenswood School District, All Students Matter, San Jose Bridge Communities and the Jewish Community Center Refugee Aid, to name a few. Our books have been used in classrooms, school libraries, book fairs, special needs situations, and at home. The consistent feedback we get is that our book donations are very successful at helping improve literacy among the children most in need.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, BookStorm has expanded its efforts by working to support digital literacy among the under-served children of the migrant and farming communities in the Bay Area. This is critical during pandemic times when Internet access is often the only window to learning.

Why is our work important?

"The perpetuation of illiteracy leads to “heavy and often tragic consequences, via lower earnings, poorer health and higher rates of incarceration” - McKinsey & Company’s The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.

There is a lot of evidence that childhood illiteracy, even delayed or deficient literacy, has devastating consequences for individuals and society. One in six children who are not reading proficiently in the third grade do not graduate from high school on time, and a child is 90% likely to remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if the child is a poor reader at the end of first grade. Providing literacy support in childhood is critical.

Despite that, 61% of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children, 37% of children arrive at kindergarten without the skills necessary for lifetime learning, 50% of children from low-income communities start first grade up to two years behind their peers.*

That is our mission: provide age-appropriate books for children in underserved communities, for use in multiple settings like classroom, home and school libraries so children have a chance to acquire lifetime learning skills through literacy.

*Stats on this page sourced from literacyproject.org