Royal Highness: As a World-Renowned

¶ … Royal Highness:

As a world-renowned humanitarian and philanthropist, you are already fully aware of the staggering education problem affecting numerous low-income communities in many parts of the world. Your generous support of high school reading achievement is tremendously appreciated in those communities that have benefited from your previous generosity. As you know, millions of children have no access to age-appropriate books in their preschools, community centers, and after school programs. Their life prospects are diminished before they reach adulthood because they suffer tremendously high illiteracy rates. Meanwhile, there is substantial empirical literature published by educators and public policy analysts that suggest that simply increasing the availability of age-appropriate books and other reading materials is among the most effective and economical ways of improving the lives of many people.

According to education system analyst and author Susan Neumann, (author of Closing the Book Gap and numerous peer-reviewed articles), literacy rates directly determine the life-long professional prospects and chance for social development and advancement in the adult population, and children raised in poor communities currently have far less opportunity to become literate than their peers raised in upper-middle-class communities. Whereas students in middle-class communities have access to approximately thirteen books per child, children living in poor communities typically share every single age-appropriate library book. Another education system analysts, Debbie Miller, describes in her book, Reading With Meaning, that small children, infants, and toddlers who hold books, see books in their homes and daycare facilities, and who simply watch their parents and teachers turn book pages, already have a 52% higher rate of excelling in literacy when they begin to read in Kindergarten and First Grade.

Insufficient literary resources can also be linked quite directly to crime rates and to its multi-generational perpetuation. Pro-Literacy Worldwide reports that the connection between illiteracy and crime is accurate enough that third grade literacy rates are considered reliable data to project future prison capacity needs. In fact, 85% of all juveniles referred to and held in the custody of juvenile court system are illiterate. Moreover, the single most accurate predictor of criminal recidivism among the wider (adult) prison population who enter the system illiterate is whether or not those prisoners learned how to read and write during their incarceration. Those who do not are more than three times more likely to re-offend.

I am currently witnessing, first-hand, the deterioration of my community in Denver, Colorado in ways that improved access to age-appropriate literature for children could immediately help resolve. At Children's Haven, a program that serves infants, toddlers, and preschool children, we have a desperate need for age appropriate books. We have always been able to maintain the minimum amount of children's reading materials to help children in the past by relying on the charitable donation of unwanted books from community members. Because of the current state of the economy, our donations have, unfortunately, hit an all-time low, with no prospect of immediate improvement before the situation gets considerably worse. We make every effort to preserve our valuable educational materials, but they are falling apart.