What is our Job in this world?

Back in about 1976 or ‘77 I was a North Berkeley teenager. I and a bunch of teen friends often hung out in the home of one of that Group. One late evening we were in that home’s living room; the Father of the house, was there — he often joined us for a time; just as often it was just us kids there. The topic turned to “What will we do in the future, with our future” kind of talk. (This dad made it easy to talk and think about Big Ideas, he was that kinda grownup, at ease with teens). At some point someone asked him what he thought we were supposed to do, what we ought to think about. He responded something like, “You have been raised in this vast, rich, . . . intellectual soup. I think it’s your job to get out and share it”. I’m sure I have the words wrong here, but his message really stuck with me. I had then, and still do, an image of a vast, deep Cauldron, simmering a rich broth of ideas, knowledge, insight, understanding, curiosity. . . . and a big ladle, dipping it up and sharing it with the world while constantly being added to from the world.

I never forgot the message of that evening. We were lucky, and could use the lucky good circumstances we were born into to benefit this world, to benefit its people.

Lately, I feel I’ve found my job. Research led me to it — reading, repeatedly, about the well-documented “Academic Achievement Gap”; and the “Kindergarten Readiness Gap” often written about as if it were the origin of that pesky Achievement Gap, and that if it could just be “addressed” the children falling in it could “catch up”. Maddening.

We know how to raise infants to be “Kindergarten ready” FIVE YEARS after they start their life with us. All the “interventions” in the world cannot fill gaps formed in those Five Years. Wealthy, well-off, well-fed and housed families raise Kinder-Ready 5 year olds all the time. We know how to, and what causes lack readiness. We know how to stack the odds in favor of literacy and school readiness. Time to stop studying it and Just Do The Right Things.

Providing books from birth can’t help every child, but it can help a whole lot of them! A homeless and hungry child needs those basic gaps filled before we worry about getting them books. But there are huge numbers of housed, fed and clothed children in loving, hardworking families striving to keep them housed and fed. With Imagination Library it is so easy to provide those children with books from birth, and dramatically stack the odds in favor of Literacy and Kindergarten Readiness for them.

So, that’s my work in this world: to put books into as many 0-5 year olds hands and homes as I can, as many as funding allows, as many as I’m able to make IL available to.

I admire deeply housing, health care and healthy food activists at all levels: at the street level as well as at local, state and National politics levels. We desperately need better policy! My hat is off to all efforts on those fronts. And I’m right behind them, trying to increase literacy from the start so that all our children can grow up to understand, shape, and demand, policies that create healthy programs and living conditions for all of us.