Paul White is on a mission.
The children’s bookseller, spurred on by some frankly depressing statistics about literacy, decided to try and give away 52 books every single week for the year.
Not just given away either. Hidden around local communities and turned into book-hunting events across the Medway towns.
It hasn’t been quite as smooth sailing as he might have liked, but it’s clear that he is having an impact. The Medway Look For A Book Facebook group is full of pictures posted by happy parents of their children clutching books they have found in one of Paul’s hunts.
Paul’s statistics offer pause for thought. While many of us take reading for granted, it isn’t that straightforward for everyone, particularly children.
10% of children on free school meals don’t have a single book at home, 20% say they never read, and 70% of school-excluded children have poor literacy skills. There is a strong correlation between access to books and reading for pleasure and stronger academic attainment.
Paul has seen this firsthand, working as a teacher, and was inspired by learning about Look For A Book schemes in other areas. While these are commonly occasional events in the school holidays, Paul had bigger ambitions for his scheme.
Given the cheap cost of the books (a single book is £1), he set himself the aim of running a book hunt in Medway every weekend, giving away 52 books at each one. With the help of his daughter, Hollie, he’d leave books around a location in Medway (recent sites have included Luton Millennium Green and Rookery Fields in Gillingham) and post the location on social media so the families can come out and find them. Inside the book, a note explains the scheme and encourages the finder to hide the book for someone else once they finish it. You can regularly see delighted posts from Paul on the Facebook group when someone posts a picture of a book they found that wasn’t left by him.
The hunts have an additional effect as well, as parents take their children to look for books and end up in parts of Medway they perhaps wouldn’t have visited otherwise. “I get comments from parents who have gone hunting, that they have found new places to go with their children though and that is always lovely to hear.”
Of course, even at £1 per book, it’s still over £50 to run each hunt, or £2,500 for an entire year. Paul quickly discovered that he couldn’t fund it all himself. “I do fund some myself, but those funds have dried up now. I had to make sure I paid the mortgage first”, he reflects.
This has led to him seeking sponsorship from local businesses, both large and small. He initially found success with a contribution from Bellway Homes that funded several hunts. Since then, smaller organisations like the Medway Little Theatre have also supported the project. Paul is eager to highlight that the entire project is non-profit, and every penny of the sponsorship income goes into providing the books for hunts.
So far, Medway Look For A Book has given away around 1,500 books in Medway, but he is now having a wider impact. Others have been directly inspired by Paul’s hunts and set them up in their own areas (including one in France), and while he finds it difficult to come up with an exact figure, he estimates it to now be tens of thousands.
Despite this, getting sponsors on board hasn’t been easy. “My pleas for help get ignored”, says Paul on the struggle to find support. “But those who do support, love the idea. I have worked with some lovely small businesses and a couple of large ones.”
Paul hasn’t sometimes struggled to find support from Medway Council too. After reaching out to the council’s Child Friendly Medway department, he found “they weren’t interested in helping at all”. At one point, he was told he wasn’t allowed to leave books for the hunts in any of Medway’s country parks, though he was able to get that lifted “after much back and forth.”
Still, none of this seems to put Paul off from his mission. While he hasn’t been able to quite keep to his initial plan of holding a book hunt every weekend, he has been running as many as the budget has been able to allow.
We all know the importance of getting children reading, and Medway is lucky to have at least one person determined to get as many books to those children as possible.
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