| Type | International organization |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2003 |
| Location | Camberwell, London |
| Origins | Started as the Nottingham Book Project |
| Key people | Director: Hannah Mitchell[1] Chairman: Mark Haggan |
| Area served | UK, East Africa |
| Mission | READ International delivers collaborative, student led initiatives to improve access to education across the world and increase youth participation in the global community. |
| Volunteers | >1000 |
| Website | http://www.readinternational.org.uk |
READ International is a charity (NGO) that aims to improve access to education in East Africa by collecting school textbooks and children’s literature from primary and secondary schools throughout the UK, sorting through the books and sending the most relevant, up-to-date, and high quality ones to schools in Tanzania and Uganda. Any books collected which are not relevant or appropriate to send are sold online or recycled to generate funding.
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READ International began life in 2003 as a Book Project based at Nottingham University, founded by a group of socially entrepreneurial students following a ‘gap year’ teaching in Tanzania. Now there are close to 1,000 student volunteers involved, operating from a network of over 45 university sites across the UK.
READ has grown rapidly and since their first shipment of books in 2005, they have shipped a total of 564,000 books to Tanzania and are supporting the renovation of dozens of school libraries so that access to these books is also improved. They have also sent several tonnes of sports kits, science equipment, and school stationery. In Tanzania and Uganda they work closely with the Ministry of Education to ensure that their books go to where they are most needed.
Tanzania and Uganda follow a secondary school syllabus almost identical to the UK, but teachers often lack the resources needed to teach. In the UK newer editions of books inevitably replace the old (very often only a couple of years old though), which makes for good quality, but technically out of date textbooks filling up school store rooms or ending up in landfill. READ sends them to where they are really needed, improving access to education for thousands of children in East Africa.
READ has successfully established some very exciting partnerships: Big Yellow Self Storage provides free storage for all of the books they collect at any of their sites across the UK; British Airways provides them with many free and heavily discounted flights for all of their volunteers; Latham and Watkins, a city law firm, provides pro bono legal support; KPMG provides free office space in Dar es Salaam and Kampala; DHL provides free and discounted logistics support; Staples collects disused stationery from thousands of UK schools and students at all of their UK stores; Waterstone's collects books in their stores across the West Midlands; and the British Library has developed an electronic book sorting database for them to more accurately sort through all the books they collect.
In October 2010, READ launched their Read for READ anthology at the British Library in London[2]. The anthology is a collection of stories from the Read for READ Short Story Competition, which saw aspiring writers being given the chance to showcase their work, and be judged for final publication by writer Sarfraz Manzoor, publisher Sonny Leong, literary agent Clare Alexander, and the British Library’s Director of Human Resources, Mary Canavan. The winning stories, brought together in this anthology alongside work from established authors Ian MacLeod, Rhys Hughes and John Saul, celebrate the endless possibilities that can derive from a single book.
Since registering as a charity they have had their work recognised in a number of ways. READ International was winner of Best New Charity in the Charity Times Awards 2007 [3], finalists in the Guardian Charity of the Year 2009[4], and finalists in the Charity Times Awards in 2009
READ International also won the Best "Business-Charity Partnership" award at the Institute of Fundraising Awards 2010[5] and the "International Aid and Development Award" at the UK Charity Awards 2010[6].
Their Founder and previous Director Robert Wilson has been winner of the prestigious Unltd award[7], been a finalist in the Enterprising Young Brit Awards 2006, won the Social Enterprise Day Award 2006, been a finalist in the Edge Upstarts Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2008,[8] and winner of the Enterprising Young Brit Award in 2010.[9]