Happy Thursday!

Enjoyable day yesterday.  I don’t normally talk about work on this blog but will make an exception today.  For the last 8 weeks our organization has hosted 6 bright young interns who worked at our various locations during the week learning the banking business and fulfilling a number of roles with in the banks.

Then for one and a half days each week they learned about leadership, food scarcity, small business ownership, community issues, community service, and a variety of other career choices.

One of the things they learned about was deficiency in reading at grade level and the disparity in life skills and choices that causes.  If a child is not reading at grade level by 3rd grade the consequences of that lead to a number of serious life issues.

Corrine Kroger from the Community Foundation has served as a catalyst for the Dubuque Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. This collaborative effort by funders and nonprofit partners across the community is working to ensure that more children succeed in school and are prepared for college, a career and active citizenship. The campaign focuses on the most important predictor of school success and high school graduation: grade-level reading by the end of third grade.

Linda Nudd (former Maquoketa School Principal) works for the Jackson County Campaign for Grade Level Reading and has been a great resource to bring much needed attention to the problem.  She and Corrine presented a program to our interns about reading deficiency and one of the initiatives to combat it is what is called “Little Free Libraries.”

Our organization has a community based program called “Pay It Ohnward” where we give our full-time employees $100 and part-time employees $50 to contribute to a charity or cause of their choice.  So the Interns decided they wanted to contribute their money to providing the first “Little Free Library” in Maquoketa.  It is located at Little Bear Park in Maquoketa.

Yesterday we had the official ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of the little library.

This little girl was the first to use the new Little Library.  Several young people also donated books.  It was a wonderful event and gave me a lot of pride to be a very small part of this wonderful group.

That’s it for today.  Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.