Imagine bookstores with new ways to engage their communities, easy access to funding and new business models. Now imagine these bookstores having strategies to increase readership, attract and retain high-caliber staff, and provide meaningful careers paying meaningful wages. Through these bookstores our communities deepen literacy, increase civic engagement, and become stronger.
If you can imagine this scenario, then it is time to embrace bookstores as a social cause. It is time to invest in bookstores so they have the means to strengthen and reinvent themselves. We seek to launch a movement to encourage a new wave of investments in bookstores similar to the investments that have historically been made in public libraries, museums, public radio and television, and non-profit journalism and literacy organizations.
To create this transformational change, we need you!
We invite you to dream and collaborate together – to reimagine and transform America’s bookstores into next-generation community bookstores, to help literary entrepreneurs open new bookstores in book deserts, and to help bookstores strengthen their place in the hearts of their communities as thriving centers for ideas and conversations.