Another celebrity visitor was U.S. Attorney General Janet 

 Reno, a frequent guest at a RIF project in the District of Co- 

 lumbia. During a RIF Career Day last February, Ms. Reno 

 read aloud to children and talked about African American 

 scholars and statesmen. The children, in turn, quoted their fa- 

 vorite poems and then took part in a RIF book event. 



Targeted Initiatives 



At each stage of a child's development, RIF works to promote 

 reading: 



To ensure that children arrive at school ready to learn, RIF 

 intensified its early childhood program for disadvantaged chil- 

 dren through a collaborative agreement with the National 

 Head Start Association (NHSA). Last year NHSA sent out 

 questionnaires to 87 Head Start sites that had run RIF pro- 

 grams and received an extremely positive response about the 

 effect RIF has on children's emergent literacy: Volunteers said 

 that RIF is the key to bringing the excitement of books to pre- 

 schoolers. They also said that RIF is helping Head Start 

 groups attract community support amd involve even the most 

 reluctant parents in their children's literacy program. 



In the upper-elementary grades, children are learning that 

 science can be fun through STAR Science Technology And 

 Reading — a supplemental RIF curriculum that combines 

 hands-on science activities with reading and a sci-tech mentot- 

 ing program. Last year, Iowa publisher Kendall/Hunt pub- 

 lished the series of eight STAR "labs" and the GE Fund 

 provided a grant to extend STAR to children in upstate New 

 York, western Massachusetts, and southern Vermont. A course 

 on the STAR program was conducted by RIF last July, during 

 a Smithsonian Summer Seminar for Teachers. 



Children who have not had exposure to books because they 

 live in highly transitional settings are being reached through 

 RIF's Project Open Book . Last year this privately-backed pro- 

 gram for seriously at-risk children marked its fifth year by de- 

 livering nearly 1. 5 million books to 823 shelters, prison 

 waiting rooms, and similar settings in 43 states and the Dis- 

 trict of Columbia. 



RIF is also wotking with the private sector to bring books 

 and reading activities to Native Amencan children from doz- 

 ens of tribes and in all kinds of settings. Over the last 12 years, 

 for example, the New York Life Foundation has helped fund 

 RIF programs for more than 186,000 Native American chil- 

 dren in dozens of states. 



Another growth area was RIF's program for children in hos- 

 pitals and clinics. Last winter, for example, RIF established a 

 new program in the Adolescent Wing and Pediatric AIDs 

 Wards of the Harlem Hospital. The announcement was made 

 following the dedication of two new RIF Reading Rooms in 

 memory of the late Arthur Ashe, a longtime member of RIF's 

 Advisory Council. 



The needs of young people who can't meet the minimum 

 reading and writing demands of our society (such as filling 

 out job applications or reading directions) led RIF to form al- 



liances with after-school programs and to stage book events 

 that engage young people in reading adventures. In some 

 cases, fun activities like these have completely turned young- 

 sters around. One boy, while participating in a RIF activity or- 

 ganized by the Boys and Girls Club RIF project in 

 Milwaukee, changed his mind about books and began reading 

 about pre-Columbian Indian tribes of the Southwest and ca- 

 reers in paleontology and archeology. The boy even won a trip 

 to Colotado to participate in a real archeological dig. The year 

 1995 found that youngster in college, just one of many RIF 

 success stories. 



Young people are also being trained to promote children's 

 literacy through the RIF Youth Corps, modeled on the Club 

 RIF project in Mesa, Ariz. Last year the Corps was operating 

 in eight states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, 

 Minnesota, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. 



Highlights of the Year 



Last spring, the focus was on families reading together as RIF 

 marked Reading Is Fun Week 1995 with a "Growing Up Read- 

 ing" theme. During the National Awards Ceremony at the 

 Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Juwan Howard, pro 

 basketball star on the Washington Bullets team, spoke about 

 how he had first discovered RIF books while attending a Chi- 

 cago school. "Being a part of RIF has been a big inspiration to 

 my life," Howard told the children. 



RIF cooperated with the U.S. Department of Education in 

 launching a summer reading program for young people called 

 READ*WRITE*NOW!, as a project of the Secretary's Family 

 Involvement Partnership for Learning. Under the program, 

 kits with lists of children's books and reading activities were 

 sent out to RIF projects that operate during the summer 

 months. 



RIF's largest program for preschoolers was spotlighted dur- 

 ing the Education Department's Satellite Town Meeting. 

 Cathy Gafford, who coordinates Jean Dean RIF, a Kiwanis- 

 sponsored RIF program that reaches disadvantaged children 

 throughout the State of Alabama, was a panelist on the 

 videoconference. 



In June RIF coordinators from 12 large multi-site programs 

 came to a workshop in Washington D.C. to discuss how to 

 better meet the needs of children through their RIF pro- 

 grams, which are currently serving nearly 130,000 children at 

 some 500 sites. During the sessions, RIF gathered information 

 that it plans to use in its technical assistance to multi-site pro- 

 grams, and the volunteers came away with new ideas on how 

 to run their RIF programs. 



Throughout the last three decades the publishing com- 

 munity and RIF have worked together to bring books to 

 children and provide special discounts and services to RIF 

 projects. Last year, Waldenbooks and Borders continued 

 that tradition, by announcing a new decade of support for 

 RIF during a black tie benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria 

 Hotel in Manhattan. The benefit raised $100,000 for 



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