On Monday May 2nd, BookSpring presented a Philantropitch at the ZACH Theatre in downtown Austin to a lively audience and a panel of socially conscious entrepreneurs to expand our pediatric literacy services.
We were grateful to be the recipients that night of $11,000 from Mission Capital and the audience choice award, $10,000 through our friends at SailPoint Technologies, and $3,000 and acceptance into the Mission Capital Accelerator.
We currently serve 22,000 children through 30 clinics and 100 providers, but there are an estimated 44,000 children under the age of five living in poverty in our region. BookSpring has an ambitious plan to double our operations by 2020 so that we can provide the benefits of early access to books in the home and motivational activities that encourage parents to read aloud through people they trust, like primary care physicians.
Pediatricians are some of the first community supports that new parents meet, and they can be instrumental in conveying the importance of exposure to print and oral language in the first 3 years, even before pre-school starts.
With this funding and pro-bono consulting assistance, we will immediately expand services to 6000 new children and complete a business plan for scale up of our core “book bundles” service to clinics.
