Read Manchester’s festive book gifting campaign 

The Read Manchester elves have been busy these last few weeks preparing brand new book parcels for children and families.    

At Christmas time we always try to focus our book gifting efforts on supporting vulnerable families accessing foodbanks and community grocers.  To date, over 60 different organisations have responded to our offer of help and 12,351 books will be with our partners in time for them to gift to the children and families that they support. 

Here’s what some of these organisations said about how these books would make a difference: 

Anson community house/shop 

‘These books will be given to children who come from families who struggle and can’t afford a lot and will be lovely for children to have books’. 

Manchester Christmas Relief 

‘We will be gifting these books out during our Christmas appeal operations so parents and children have a book to wake up to on Christmas day!’ 

Manchester Central foodbank 

‘We run a holiday hunger programme that provides food items to families during the school holidays. For the Christmas Holiday we will be supporting 400 families with a food parcel to help with the food bills whilst their children are not at school.  We have included reading books donated by Read Manchester in the past and they have been very well received by our families.’ 

Getting these books sorted and delivered is really a team effort!  Supporting the Read Manchester and Libraries’ teams are Literacy Champion volunteers who offer their time to Read Manchester, often developing and delivering their own literacy initiatives too.  We have also been very grateful to have the support of local businesses to deliver the books to our partner organisations.   

Aidan Conway, Managing Director, Thermal Road Repairs told us: 

“Thermal Road Repairs is a strong advocate of Read Manchester.  Manchester is a very diverse city and we are committed to helping ensure all children, young people and adults in our community have access to books, irrespective of their social, cultural, or economic background.  It has been an honour to be a part of this important initiative and our team has really enjoyed getting out into the community to ensure its success.  We look forward to continuing our support in the new year.”  

Thank you to staff from Pell Frischmann, Thermal Road Repairs and MITIE for their invaluable help in getting these brilliant books to children – we really couldn’t have done it without you!