Programmes

Our purpose in practice

Club Readership’s public purpose has always been clear: if this is our home, then where are our stories? The publishing house was started in 2016 so that African authors could get their writing into print, and so that African literature, traditions, customs and wisdom could be chronicled and preserved.

CR Foundation takes that same question into non-profit work. We want children to grow up with books that look and sound like home. We want learners who can write to be taken seriously as authors. And we want reading and writing to be treated as part of academic triumph, not as an afterthought.

The programmes below are the work the Foundation is built to do. We describe them as we intend to run them. We do not invent numbers of schools, beneficiaries or books distributed.

School-based reading

A child is more likely to become a reader when stories are close at hand, when teachers and parents can put a book in that child’s hands, and when the book itself is not a stranger to the child’s language, place or culture.

Our school-based reading work is meant to help schools, libraries, churches and community groups do exactly that: put African stories in front of children, and support a habit of reading in class and at home. That may include storybooks and learning books written with the South African classroom in mind, activity and colouring pages, and, where it is useful, read-aloud and other ways of sharing a story together.

We are especially concerned that children should see their homes, names, languages and traditions on the page. That is not a slogan for us. It is the difference between a child who recognises themselves in a book and a child who is asked, year after year, to read as if they live somewhere else.

If you are a principal, teacher, librarian or parent who wants to talk about reading in a school or community, please write to us.

Learner-author programmes

Many young people in our schools can write. Too few of them are walked all the way from a first draft to a printed book that their school and family can hold.

The Foundation’s learner-author work is meant to close that gap. The shape of the programme is:

• School outreach — speaking with a school about the chance for a learner to write and be published.
• Learner selection — identifying a learner with the interest and support to take the work seriously, with the school’s involvement and with the consent of the learner and a guardian.
• Writing and mentorship — walking with the learner through drafts, with a mentor alongside them.
• Editing and publishing — preparing the work carefully for print.
• A launch — returning the finished book to the school and community.

The point is not only the book. It is what happens around it: a learner who is taken seriously as a writer, a school that can point to one of its own on the cover, and a community that sees African authorship as something that can start in an ordinary classroom.

A culture of reading, writing and academic triumph

The values we stand for are excellence, teamwork and community. We promote a culture of reading, writing and academic triumph. That language is not new. It is how Club Readership has long described the company it keeps, including an active relationship between the publishing house and Faculty of Best Advisory, an academic and social community that works with students and learners.

The Foundation shares that aim. Reading and writing are not only cultural work. They are also how a learner gets through school, and how a young person finds the confidence to tell the truth about their own life on the page.

Children’s stories, and the publishing house

African children’s books matter to this mission. Storybooks, learning books and activity books — including work published under the CR Kids imprint of the Club Readership publishing house — are part of the landscape in which the Foundation works. This Foundation website does not sell those books, and it does not take orders or payments.

If you want to look at the publishing house’s children’s titles, or to talk about publishing, you can visit CR Kids on clubreadership.co.za. The publishing house is a separate organisation. Its shop and author services are not part of this site.