image by the San Jose Library

11 Questions is an ongoing feature where you, the reader, tell us all about a project you are working on to create a more functional, just, and beautiful future. Then we share your project on The Sunny Way. To tell us about your project, either fill out the survey, or copy the questions below and email your answers to us. We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

What are you creating with this project? What are your goals?
I want to create a network of people interested in reading to under-privileged children, especially from the ages of birth to 5 years for the project Stories for Brain Development, the goal being to create a more literate, integrated, and emotionally stable child.

Research shows vocabulary size not only aids in brain development in early childhood but creates a child more patient, more self-controlled, and more communicative. It also shows that the vocabulary of a child from a poor home is very often under half that of a child from a middle or upper income family.

How did you get started?
Babysitting the children of friends and reading to them, I noticed how excited they would get over particular sounding words, how they would repeat over and over new or favorite words and how attentive they would become. Often they would ask me to bring the same book back, again and again.

What is the current state of your project?
Very much in the beginning stages. I am researching and educating myself and reaching out to some organizations. One evening I met a gentleman who runs a resource center for an afterschool children’s program in the area. During the evening’s meeting he called for someone to volunteer to read to the children once or twice a week. I jumped at the opportunity. Unfortunately this did not come to fruition.

However, in pursuing it I was introduced by friends to an NPR program introducing Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone and the Baby College which led to a book on Canada’s work by Paul Tough called “Whatever It Takes.” I learned of some of the current ideas on early childhood education and the absolute necessity for educational equity, plus the challenges involved in bringing a whole community’s educational standards up.

The large expense of starting education pre-birth with prospective mothers (i.e., hygiene and nutrition for themselves and their coming children, the necessity to talk and read to babies starting at birth, etc.) and continuing education in a conveyor belt fashion is miniscule when weight against persons lost to the inventiveness and diversity of total societal participation and the same people being housed in the country’s jails and penitentiaries.

What’s your next milestone? How are you getting there?
My next milestone will be to start reading to groups of preschoolers. Towards that goal I have an interview with a school in Pittsfield to volunteer once a week. Ideally, I want to find a donated space in Great Barrington, Lee, and/or Stockbridge where I can start an independent program.

Is this an individual or team project? How did you assemble your team?
Initially it will be an individual project, but only initially. I have already spoken to some friends about joining me and also coming up with suitable books, material, and new ideas for engaging children.

How do you work together?
By talking about it, sharing ideas, and drawing on each others’ experience.

Do you work with other organizations?
Initially I would work with schools and then who knows where it will lead. Generally I have found when I put out how passionate I am about this project, there is a response and a new avenue opens up.

Why are you doing this?
Because I can!

Why is this project important to you?
I left home and school before I had finished high school. I was lucky to have been helped in suggestions of books to read and cultural events to go to. Later I traveled for many years and learnt both history and geography in the process. However I am very slow to actually learn anything and believe passionately in the process and discipline involved in learning, rather than what is actually learned.

How does this fit into the big picture?
By means of the development of human consciousness and also out of cultural and economic necessity. I believe stories are an easy way to introduce children to the fact that there is a bigger picture. To teach morality with a lightness of touch from particular stories. To communicate a sense of a wider, larger world from the wonderful selection of books on the customs and folk tales of different countries. And to introduce them gently to the fact that everything is not always as it seems.

Describe how readers can contribute to or participate in your project.
By critiquing and/or adding to my vision and also by giving me the names of books which shaped their thinking as children.

How can The Sunny Way support your activities?
It already has by indicating the diversity of projects out there, the propensity of the human spirit to reach beyond its self-impossed boundaries, and by communicating the evolution of consciousness (not easy to describe) and culture that is occuring at this time.

It also helps to realize that others encounter difficulties and obstacles and that it’s perfectly possible to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

One of my favorite short poems:

3 cheers for Pooh
For Who?
For Pooh, he couldn’t swim but he rescued him.
He rescued who?
Oh! Listen do, I’m talking of Pooh
Talking of Who! Sorry I keep forgetting.
Now Pooh was a bear of enormous brain,
And he managed to float in a sort of a boat,
In a sort of a What?
In a sort of a pot,
And saved his friend from a wetting.

Part of a story that stays in my mind:

They will get them if we let them,
Come, we cannot let them get them.