How would you feel if you grew up unable to enjoy a bedtime story? In Kansas City's lowest income neighborhoods, research estimates only one book is owned, in the home, per 300 children. Reach out and Read Kansas City is working hard to ensure all children in the Kansas City area have a book to call their own.
Each year, Reach Out and Read Kansas City provides 70,634 new, culturally and developmentally appropriate books to just under 28,000 low-income children, birth to age 5, during well-child visits at our partner clinic sites, building a 15-book library for each child before he or she enters kindergarten.
Reach Out and Read Kansas City is a nonprofit program in partnership with the University of Kansas Medical Center and the University of Kansas Endowment, and a member of the national Reach Out and Read Program.
Our mission is to give young children a foundation for success by incorporating books into pediatric care and encouraging families to read aloud together.
Our History
Reach Out and Read Kansas City began in 1997 as a collaboration between pediatricians at Children's Mercy and the Department of Pediatrics at KU Medical Center. Since then, it has grown to a coalition of 37 health care clinics in the greater Kansas City metro, with an emphasis on serving our community's most vulnerable children. Reach Out and Read Kansas City is affiliated with two national literacy programs: Reach Out and Read National Center and Reading Is Fundamental.
Now in our 27th year of service, Reach Out and Read Kansas City has distributed more than 1.3 million new books to children and families in need and continues to grow and expand the reach of our program.
"We are the only national pediatric literacy model endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics."- Reach Out and Read