Wondermore Inc.

By working directly with Boston public school educators, Wondermore’s programming addresses the lack of reading resources, both in school and at home, for low-income K-8 Boston public schools students. Since launching our program in 2004, Wondermore has inspired over 10,000 young readers, and brought 52 authors and illustrators into classrooms in more than 40 elementary and middle schools in Boston. Just in the last year, 2,600 students participated in an Authors-in-Schools visit during one of 117 classroom sessions. And, beginning in September of 2017, we have been able to give a book to every student in every classroom participating in our program to keep and take home, an extension of our programming that further supports our focus on reading.

Each year, we have a target number of schools with which we would like to partner, based on strategic plan work and fundraising realities. Then, we balance requests from schools with author availability and curriculum alignment and begin the important work of collaborating with authors and illustrators, publishing houses and our local bookstore partners to keep the costs of the visits within our budget.

In 2014, Wondermore made a decision to expand its core program of bringing authors and illustrators into underserved schools by growing the number of annual visits and the number of schools and students served. To support this growth, Wondermore doubled its staff from one part-time employee to two. In 2017, we added a 3rd part time staff person.

Together, these three employees run the operations of the organization: vetting and approving schools for visits, working with teachers to identify areas of curriculum which could be enhanced by an author or illustrator visit, contacting authors and illustrators and coordinating the logistics of their visits, communicating with publishing houses and others to seek donations of books for school visits, and managing all the donor outreach and development work that allows us to continue our programming. Growing our staff has increased our salary expense, but is critical to our growth and enabling us to meet the increasing demand for our programs.

The population of students we serve is diverse, so we develop visits from authors/illustrators of color or a bi-lingual or multi-cultural authors/illustrators – someone whose persona or work resonates with the students. Often, an Authors-in-Schools visit facilitated by Wondermore is the first time students interact directly with one of these important role models. Our research has shown that as role models, their message to kids regarding the importance of reading, writing, or illustration – and how accessible these skills are to everyone – makes a very deep impression. Demographic information published by the Boston Public Schools in 2016 shows that 86% of their students identify as non-white, and 45% do not have English as a first language. Reflecting this student population, of the authors and illustrators whom Wondermore has brought to schools in the last two years, 79% are themselves people of color and/or focus their work primarily on multi-racial or multi-cultural themes.