Category: Todd Bol

The Literacy Interventionists

The result of my own study of the question, What is the best gift which can be given to a community? is that a free library occupies the first place, provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution…

– Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth

 

Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy helped build the public library infrastructure of the United States. He insisted, however, that his money not pay for books. Carnegie expected each community to stock the shelves.

Todd Bol was similarly inspired. As his Washington Post obituary explains:

He had an abundance of books, a weathered garage door in need of repair and an abiding sadness that persisted months after the death of his mother, a schoolteacher … And so, in what he later described as “a spiritual gesture” to his late mother, June, Todd Bol set to work one day in 2009.

Since Carnegie had built 2,509 libraries, Mr. Bol aimed at topping that number by one. Today there are over 100,000:

There are now Little Free Libraries in all 50 states and in 88 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Ghana, Japan and the Netherlands. They stand inside Los Angeles police stations and at New York City subway stops, at prisons in Wisconsin and hospitals in Ireland, at a refu­gee camp in Uganda and a schoolyard in South Sudan. Inside each book exchange are about 20 to 100 volumes, an ever-rotating selection of self-help guides, romance novels, thrillers, how-to manuals, children’s books, cookbooks, magazines and whatever else a community decides to donate.

 

***

A literacy interventionist works with students who need extra help reading and writing. Literacy intervention is what Gerard Benson did for society. His obituary in the Independent describes his efforts:

…the poet Gerard Benson was “discovered” in the Sixties as a member of The Barrow Poets, who performed everything from Shakespeare and Milton to limericks and risqué ballads everywhere – from the back rooms of pubs to BBC’s Late Night Line-Up, around the country and in Europe and the US.

The Barrow Poets had a top ten hit in Australia with a performance of this song. Their phonological awareness would impress any literacy interventionist.

Mr. Benson also helped introduce poetry to the daily commute: since 1986, passengers on the London Underground have been reading poems posted in subway cars. Public transportation systems all over the world now feature poetry.