Jane’s vision, to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to develop a love of reading and to share their experiences, has seen her build up a charity which now employs 60 staff members, across the UK, and offers a lifeline for hundreds of people, simply by reading aloud together.

On receiving the award, Jane said:

“It’s great to be seen as a radical; it’s so easy to take books and reading for granted. Reading aloud is an experience in its own right, bringing people together through sharing deep experiences. Since my teaching days, I’ve worked to take books to where they are not always found, bringing people together in care homes, prisons, hospitals, schools, libraries, community centres, supermarkets and corporate board rooms. ”

So, what next? She’d like to see the successful Get Into Reading model adopted as standard practice in the NHS, care homes and libraries, enabling them to do more to meet social and individual needs for the twenty-first century.

Our team of interns entered Jane for the competition, run by NESTA and The Observer, by creating a video to showcase her ethos, leadership, and delicious cooking, which you can watch here:

To find out more about Jane, why not visit her blog, follow her on Twitter, or read her essay explaining how The Reading Revolution came into being in Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!

Niall, Zoe, Mark Thomas from the Liverpool Post and Donna from WECC celebrate The Reader Organisation's Social Enterprise Mark award

Gaining the Social Enterprise Mark shows the world that our work is driven by an aim to positively impact people and the communities in which they live in on a day-to-day basis. Get Into Reading is continuously making that strong  and noticeable social benefit felt across Merseyside, providing group members with outcomes such as increased general positivity about life, a better understanding of those around them and enhanced social interaction – recent evalution showed that 95% of people enjoyed having the opportunity to meet people they wouldn’t usually meet in day-to-day life by attending a weekly reading group.

We were joined in our headquarters at West Everton Community Council to celebrate receiving the prestigious award by Mark Thomas, Editor of The Liverpool Post, and Donna Ellison, a WECC volunteer. Being officially recognised as a Social Enterprise will allow us to increase our activity in the local community, connecting more people with reading and meaningful social activity.

Zoe Gilling, The Reader Organisation’s Business Manager said:

“We’re really proud to have been awarded the Social Enterprise Mark. It’s really important to us that we are able to generate trading income to reinvest directly into the local communities where Get into Reading began, is growing, and is needed most.”

The Reader Organisation joins other ethical businesses that have been recognised by being awarded the Mark such as Age UK, Blackburne House and the Big Issue.

Lucy Findlay, Managing Director of the Social Enterprise Mark Company said:

“We are delighted to award the prestigious Social Enterprise Mark to The Reader Organisation. Social enterprises come in all shapes and forms so it’s great to see vital, local charities understanding the importance of being part of the wider social enterprise movement.”

Santa Zoe and her little helpers

But don’t just take my word for it, here’s a testimony from our Wirral apprentice – and our youngest member of staff – Eamee Boden:

Completing the Santa Dash was such a good feeling. Being one of thousands of red and blue Santas it was great to be a part of that crowd, even though it was really windy, hail stoning and raining. It didn’t bother anyone about the rain as they were either raising money for a charity (like we were), or in memory of a loved one. The fact that everybody wanted to be a part of it was amazing and doing such a good thing kept people going despite the terrible weather conditions. Just before going up and across the flyover I couldn’t believe the amount of people that were there. I couldn’t get over the fact that supporters were standing on the pavements cheering complete strangers on. There was one guy who stood on a balcony holding a big sign post with the words ‘Santa is an Evertonian’. I don’t know about the reds but this certainly did please a lot of blues (including myself ) , and people were looking up to and agreeing with him.

At the finishing point - with the real Santa?

When the race was over, it was an achievement that felt really good. I felt pleased and proud not only of myself but for our team, we worked hard and we pulled it off together.

Thank you for supporting us as we raised a whopping £1,010! A very big giant, huge, massive, ginormous thank you to everybody. However, if you were meaning to donate and forgot to get around to it you could still donate to this cause here in hindsight – Thank you all and see you next year for more Santa Dashing goodness.

Running since 1971 (when they were known as the Whitbread Literary Awards), the Costa Book Awards are one of the biggest and most prestigious literary prizes in the UK, recognising a range of the most widely enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland. The awards are also unique for being the only literary prize which places an equal emphasis on children’s books alongside adult literature.

The Unforgotten Coat has been nominated in the Children’s Book category. The accolade tops off what has been an amazing year for Our Read, with 50,000 copies of the book captivating hundreds of thousands of children (and adults) across the UK – and beyond (we’ve received postcards from Our Read readers as far afield as Spain, Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria and Hong Kong). The Our Read launch day took a special reading train from Liverpool to London and back (with Frank himself on board) and since then, there’s been tons of other events centered around The Unforgotten Coat. We’d like to offer our congratulations to Frank for this honour and thank him for ‘giving’ the book to Our Read – we couldn’t have done it without him.

The category winners will be announced on 4th January 2012. For more information on the awards, visit the Costa Book Awards website.

In case you were still wondering about which of our three teams won, well that was Jen’s team consisting of Jen, Sophie, Anna and Mike. With what was actually a lightning time of around 100 minutes between them! They came 3rd out of all of the 20 charity teams!

Second place was my team consisting of Me, Beth, Lynn and Michele who came in with a not too shabby time of 107 minutes and finished a respectable 6th in the overall charity team rankings.

And last but certainly not least was Lee’s team, who, due to circumstances beyond their control (they only had three people in their team and thus were not eligible for proper placement) they finished 19th out of 20 teams – even with Dave’s brilliant time of 24 minutes!

So again another great big massive thank you for helping us raise a grand total of £562.50 to go towards our work with looked after children.

Have a great weekend.

Pre-run smiles and excitement

Stretches so strange, the police get involved

Thank you for supporting our Reader Runners! We had a great time on Sunday (and a pretty exhausting one too…). Very big congratulations to Beth Bisbee, who joined one of our teams of Reader Runners and actually won the overall prize for fastest female (21 minutes)! What was the prize? £50 and a trophy. Nice.

However, there was some controversy surrounding two of our team members: one of them being me (as per), the other being Miss Sophie Povey who thinks she beat me. Here is what she had to say (in poetic form, obviously):

Niall thinks he beat me, but I beat Niall

When will he realise that I beat him by a mile?

I was raiding my goody bag whilst he was puffing round

Kissing my winning medal as ‘the winner’ I was crowned.

Sophie crossing the finish line (before Niall?)

Well Niall’s not one to shy away from an 8 Mile style poem battle. Here’s what I replied:

Sophie seems to think her time, outstreches and outshines mine,

I told her that’s way out of line, don’t you know that frauds a crime?”

I breezed around in twenty-five, when Povey labored got twenty-eight.

It doesn’t take a genius, to spot how she was late, yes mate! Thank you, goodbye, I’m ggggggreat! 

So there you have it, we’re all still alive: even Jen who said she was going to read aloud all the way, she actually did (poems from Michael Rosen’s, Quick Let’s Get Out of Here)!  I can personally vouch for that (and well, I’m just as surprised as you!).

Poetry in motion...

We don’t know yet what which of our three teams won – the official results aren’t in yet – we’ll let you know when we do!

A very BIG thank you to all the people who sponsored us to support our work reading with looked-after children. We have currently raised £427.50. if you haven’t had the chance to sponsor us yet (or were waiting for proof that we had done it!), our online sponsorship page is open until the end of next week and we are also waiting on some good old-fashioned paper sponsorship forms, so we’ll let you know the grand total soon.  Thank you all! (We’re all off to rest our muscles now…)

If you’ve sponsored us already, very many thanks – if you’ve not yet and you’d like to, there’s still time (click here).

Mr Tickle first appeared on bookshelves in 1971 and since then an astonishing 120 million Mr Men and Little Miss books have been sold worldwide – an average of one every 2.5 seconds. The average household in the UK owns more than one Mr Men or Little Miss book, with total sales in the UK alone now at more than 75 million. In the last decade Roger Hargreaves became the third best-selling British author, topped only by JK Rowling and Dan Brown.

If your day needs brightening up, it’s worth paying a visit to the Mr Men website and also, The Independent have a video on their site to show you how to draw Mr Grumpy. (I know what I’ll be spending my evening doing…)

So, tell us, who’s your favourite Mr Men or Little Miss?

To find out more about their immense 504 mile trek and to see some of their stunning holiday snaps, take a look at their blog.