On today’s show we highlight the joy of reading with Rowan Childs of the Madison Reading Project. Host Dana Pellebon wanted to focus her premier show as the new host of Tuesday’s A Public Affair around literacy and feature an organization that’s working to get new and engaging books to kids in Dane County. 

Childs says that she started the Madison Reading Project after realizing that her son was learning how to read but not how to love reading. At that time the Race to Equity report was also released, showing what many people already knew: that Black kids were falling behind in education in Madison. After a 3 month pilot program to get new books to kids at the Salvation Army, Childs says she knew there was a need to create a permanent program. And now the Madison Reading Project has been going for 11 years.

The Madison Reading project serves more than over 12,000 kids in a year, getting them more than 140K books last year with diverse main characters that represent them. Their main fundraiser is a fashion show in which participants make dresses out of paper, like the garment on the cover of July’s Umoja Magazine that features legendary Black women in Madison. Childs also shares the challenges of book censorship and attacks on DEI. She also celebrates coming Banned Books week by highlighting one of the books from her childhood, The Rabbit’s Wedding, in which a black and a white rabbit get married. 

Rowan Childs is the founder and co-executive director of the Madison Reading Project. Previously, she worked for the Village of Mount Horeb and was recently named to InBusiness’s Power 100 list. 

Featured image of Rowan Childs and Dana Pellebon in the WORT studio. Photo courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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