Support Bess the Book Bus' 2010 nationwide mobile literacy outreach.Bess the Book Bus, Inc.

A world without books is one with limited opportunity to foster imagination and creativity.
Bess the Book Bus will travel to 40 states in 90 days visiting Title 1 schools, Head Start programs, shelters, and Boys and Girls clubs conducting read- alouds and giving away new books. Our goal is to build home libraries for our children while generating enthusiasm for the reading experience. It has been asserted by First Book that “the single strongest indicator of a child’s future reading ability has proven to be the number of books in the home.” 67 percent of low -income families own no books for their children. Where middle-income neighborhoods have an average of thirteen books per child, there is only one book per three hundred in low-income neighborhoods. Bess will bridge that enrichment gap by delivering more than 35,000 books into communities nationwide for the second year in a row while maintaining our Tampa outreach that serves 8,000 plus families each year.