VOLUNTEERS SPREAD THE WORD
Building a network for literacy
You can’t trust everything you read. But this much is true: a group of volunteers believes literacy is the only way to tease out fact from fiction. And it starts with getting books onto shelves in libraries and schools and community centres — and especially into the hands of kids.
These volunteers operate like a fire brigade, except instead of passing buckets from hand to hand, they are passing books.
Hudson’s War Memorial Library is small, with limited shelf space. It has one computer for accessing its catalogue. Books and DVDs are signed out by hand, and the slips are marked using a stamp and ink pad. Sometimes the dates get mixed up, but it always gets sorted out. Children know the ink pad is also for them — the librarians have a basket of kid-friendly stamps tucked under the counter.
Fines are 10 cents a day for books, $1 a day for DVDs, but as one mother recently found out when she returned a video her kids had taken out for Halloween, the maximum fine is $10. As it turns out, she didn’t have to pay it, because of the library’s annual amnesty.
All in all, a friendly, welcoming space. But behind the small-town facade is a league of workers whose reach is as deep as their purpose.
All the staff are volunteers, and the library is self-funded by the Library Shoppe, a weekly rummage sale known locally as the Bunker, and a monthly sale of donated books.
The library is bursting with books and people at these sales, but not all the books get sold. The volunteers sort the leftovers, box them up and move them out.
The distribution list includes: the Montreal General Hospital, Lakeshore General Hospital, Canadian Diabetes Association, Nova in three locations (Hudson, Beaurepaire and Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue), Renaissance (Île-Perrot), Lester B. Pearson School Board, Hudson IGA, Hudson Legion, Whitlock Golf Club, Le Nichoir, Mount Pleasant Home and School Association and the Bank of Montreal. The latest organization added to the list is Book Clubs for Inmates.
“It is our goal to make sure our remainder books go to charities or good causes,” library volunteer Jackie Jackson says. “We are forced to put some to recycling: soiled books, underlined books, books with yellowed or foxed pages, old books, which we believe we cannot or our charities cannot sell. We take a lot of time considering whether each book could be given another life.”
Ute Wilkinson is part of that second-life line. Her off hours don’t stray too far from her day job — she is a librarian for the LBPSB. Once a month, she drives to the War Memorial to collect the leftover kids’ books and delivers them to the next set of hands.
Retired teacher Marion Daigle is another champion of literacy, starting with the very young. It is a rare book they do not foster on the way to its next home. And there is a home for every book.
“I never lacked for books as a child, but for various reasons, not all children are so lucky,” Wilkinson says. “The remoteness and isolation of English schools in other parts of Quebec make it very hard for them to get their hands on English books, as does the relative poverty of some of our urban population. It gives me great pleasure to act as a conduit and to move books from Hudson, where they are no longer needed, to other places where people want them.
“Also, opening those boxes of books left over from the sale each month is like Christmas! I never know what treasures await.”
The social network has nothing on this crowd: At a funeral recently, Daigle met a woman who lives in North Hatley. As any conversation with Daigle is likely to do, the subject of books came up. The woman talked to Daigle about the town’s library and its need for books.
Tell me what you need, Daigle said, and within a month, she had delivered a few boxes of books. She found someone who just happened to be going that way to deliver them.
This is Daigle’s way. She loves to talk, she loves to listen, she sees opportunity everywhere. She is a fierce believer in the need to get books into the hands of kids, whatever their interest. Her mantra is: “Keep them reading.”
Daigle is a longtime volunteer for the Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations, whose web extends from Dans La Rue to Sept-Îles.
No request is too small. She once sent a boxful of books to Entry Island School in Îles-de-la-Madeleine that had dwindled to two students. The teacher told her the two teenage boys were interested in food and asked whether she could find some books on international cooking. She could, and she did. Daigle got a note back from one of the boys: “Thank you for the books. We didn’t think anybody cared.”
Daigle is one of five people on the QFHSA literacy committee — they keep tabs on what books schools — and communities — need. Their goal is to foster literacy in the information age, to have a knowledge-based society.
… living resource on the history of education in Quebec.
When people talk about literacy, Daigle says, “they often hear illiteracy.” But the term covers more than the basic ability to read and write: It incorporates “critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making.”
And it all starts with getting books into the hands of children — the earlier, the better.
Daigle is “extremely passionate about educational issues in Quebec’s English community,” says Robert Green, a teacher at Westmount High School.
“Her commitment and decades of involvement working on these issues make her an incredible living resource on the history of education in Quebec.”
Daigle’s book network includes schools from La Tuque to LaSalle and Gatineau to Kahnawake, the Place Cartier Adult Education Centre and organizations like Dans La Rue, Revitalization SaintPierre and the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal.
John Sams, a teacher at Gaspé Polyvalent, says his school has received “about 20 boxes of books over the past four years. Each box has been a happy addition to our classroom libraries. The students look forward to the arrival of ‘fresh’ reading material to devour.
“I feel that having paper versions of books available provides students with more opportunities to pick up a book and test it out. Meaning, the student is not burdened with downloading, reloading, or trying to find a book online. Digital books have their place and purpose, but there is certainly no replacement for a traditional, paper in hand, page-turner.”
Daigle is a guardian angel, says Mélanie Leblanc, executive director of Heritage Lower Saint Lawrence. The not-for-profit organization based in Métis-sur-Mer serves English-speaking communities from La Pocatière to Matane.
Access to English books is limited, so Daigle’s care packages are a godsend, she says. She understands what our needs are, Leblanc says.
Leblanc has nothing against e-books, and appreciates how accessible they are. But she promotes the paper, 3D experience for kids. When they finish reading, they can look at the thickness of the book and see the pages, “their sense of achievement is more concrete. …
“It’s like seeing an image of a mountain on a computer versus seeing the real thing.”