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333 South State Street V163, Lake Oswego, OR 97034
Across the country, literacy nonprofits are changing lives every day. We’re honored to shine a light on their incredible work—stories filled with hope, resilience, and meaningful impact. This space is dedicated to sharing their efforts and honoring the difference they’re making in their communities.
Cobb Collaborative educates, engages, and empowers local people and organizations to improve outcomes for children and families in Cobb County.
We have installed 64 Little Free Libraries across Cobb County since 2021 with an aim of increasing access to books and promoting print awareness, a foundational tenet of the science of reading. We donate a starter set of gently-loved books to the receiving site and arrange for a ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony, complete with a press release. This gives us an opportunity to engage with many different types of community leaders, from elected officials, healthcare, nonprofit, educational, to first responders, faith, and business leaders. We have partnered with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts as well as civic groups to build some of these book-sharing resources and have used grant funding to purchase others from the national Little Free Library Foundation.
This started as a 50-piece project in 2023 and has grown to 280 kits in 5 different communities across Cobb County each month. Each kit contains a book that corresponds with a seasonal or educational theme, a hands-on activity that families can do together that supports the theme of the book, an instructional insert with inquiry questions for caregivers as well as other suggested activities that families can do to support learning. On a regular basis, the books are bilingual so that we are inclusive. Not only do these kits help to increase access to books, they build home libraries and encourage positive childhood experiences as the entire kit is designed to be a bonding opportunity between caregiver and child.
For the past three summers, we have partnered with the Cobb County Public Library to bring the Library's summer reading challenge to 4 apartment communities in Marietta. We partner with one of the local YMCAs before their weekly food distribution events. It is our desire to make the summer reading challenge as accessible as possible for the families that live at these 4 communities. We bring a mixture of new and gently-loved books each week.
The children (and adults) track their minutes read each week, and each week right before the food distribution begins, we calculate minutes read and help the children select books for the upcoming week. We encourage the families to keep the books as we want to build home libraries. At the end of the summer, we have a celebration for each community with snacks, simple games, music and takeaways. It is a great partnership between the library, YMCA, the apartment communities and the Marietta City Schools system.
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