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What we don’t do
At Book Dash we do not work directly with any of the end users of our books. We do not work directly with children, or train practitioners or teachers, or go into homes to work with families. This is because we are primarily a publishing organisation: we saw the need for relevant, fun, age-appropriate content to support various programmes for young children, and developed our 12-hour volunteer-based publishing model in response to the need. All 167 books that we have published on our website, together with almost 600 translations into South African languages, are open-licensed and free for anyone around the world to use and adapt; we do not impose any restrictions.
What we do do
We do provide much-needed relevant resources to organisations who work directly with children and families. Since 2014, Book Dash has distributed almost 3 million physical copies of our books through a network of more than 350 on-the-ground organisations in South Africa and our neighbouring countries. We do approve our distribution partners only after scrutiny of their programmes, management capacity and sustainability. We do forge strong relationships with approved distribution partners, and we do review their suitability on an annual basis to ensure that our books are sent to partners who use them well.
We do also keep abreast of developments, and participate actively, in the different fields we work in: Early Childhood Development (we are a member of NECDA, a South African network of ECD organisations), publishing and book-gifting (we are a member of IBBY, as well as the only African member of the Global Network of Early Years Bookgifting), the literacy sector (we are members of LITASA) and the nonprofit sector.
Who helps us do what we do?
We have loyal and supportive funding partners who believe in the work we do at Book Dash (sending books home for young children to own). They support this belief concretely by providing funding for operations, book-creation events, translations and printing. This funding base includes South African and international private trusts, as well as CSI divisions of South African and international corporations, and some generous individual donors. A number of our donors have been supporting Book Dash for a number of years, and multi-year grants from other donors enable us to plan longer-term projects without the anxiety of constant fundraising.
What they say about what we do
Typically, the Book Dash distribution partners are organisations that work directly with children and their families in the fields of ECD, healthcare or literacy, and who use our books to support their programmes. Here are two pieces of feedback that underline the value that Book Dash books bring to our partners:
Alison Zikalala, Greensparks Education
“The children were excited to receive their own books and were even more surprised that they were allowed to take the books home to keep. Book Dash is the only organisation we know who actually allow the children to own the books rather than donating to the crèches. This is very important for the children as they see that the investment is in them directly, not just their crèche.”
Dr. Nicki Dawson, Ububele
“The Book Dash books assist us in helping create an opportunity for parents to engage in child-led, quality, pleasurable time with their infants – the central building blocks for healthy and secure attachment relationships. They help us to increase parent engagement and facilitate conversations about why pleasurable and fun parent-child interactions are so important for children. As an added bonus – this helps to facilitate literacy and promote reading.”
"To delve deeper into what we do and how we do it, visit this page on our website" |
