Our Mission

Making books a Berkeley birthright.

We believe every child should own an excellent personal library before Kindergarten.

Our affiliation with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library allows us to offer their program delivering a new, age-appropriate book every month to any child under age 5 living in Berkeley, California.    

                                                                           Books are a gift to the child.

Imagination Library books are intentionally chosen to reflect a rich diversity of people, their roles, and environments. The Selection Team reviews and updates titles annually. 

You could buy the same books yourself, but you cannot buy the excitement and pleasure a child experiences when their book with their name on the label arrives  -- nor can you buy the research, time, and care the IL Selection Team puts in to the title list.

There is no cost to register your child for the program, but that's not the best reason to do so: it's the quality of the collection; it's the recurring excitement of "my book" arriving in the mail -- and, arriving with it, motivation (if not outright demand!) to read it, have it read aloud.   

We love Imagination Library because the books are excellent and because it's so much fun. Of course, there's plenty of research to show that the pretense of books in a preschooler's home is the single strongest indicator of later literacy and academic success, and we fully appreciate that. But what warms our hearts and gets us into the office are stories and comments from parents about the excitement their children get when books arrive, addressed to the child. We are joyfully confident that the motivation to read my book now, and repeatedly, will show up in test scores years down the road, and that's important. What keeps us working to make books a Berkeley birthright is the vision of the monthly joy of the gift in the mail, and the desire to expand the program across the East Bay in the future. 

Our Programs

Targeted small Programs

* "Welcome Baby" book bags: For two small programs serving expectant mothers we supply tote bags containing books for infants, including I Love You Like Sunshine , to distribute. HATCH Doulas in Oakland serve very young women emerging from difficult circumstances. Berkeley's Black Infant Health program serves expectant mothers in Berkeley and surrounding communities. Both these programs include the importance of nurturing literacy from the start; we supply new parents in their programs the tools to do so, from the start. 

*Demographically Targeted Books: We purchase books outside of Imagination Library that feature children/families of color and/or are bilingual (Spanish, mostly) for our "Welcome Baby" bags, for events we table at with partners such as Healthy Black Families and Black Infant Health, and to offer -- donation suggested! - at Baby Book Club. Our intention is to make books available to children who are woefully under represented in the children's book publishing world: over 70% of new children's books feature only or nearly only white children/families (when characters are human). It is a powerful thing to see oneself reflected on the pages of a book you hold; we want this experience to be part of every child's life, from the start.