The Cinco de Mayo event on 23rd St. in Richmond/San Pablo this past Sunday was a rousing success.
The overall attendance at the Festival was huge (event organizers estimated the crowd to be 10,000 to 15,000). There were lots of families with children, particularly in the earlier hours of the event. West County Reads was able to generate considerable excitement about children’s reading though our Literacy Village. In addition to ourselves, our little village included the Richmond Library’s bookmobile and the County Library’s information/library card sign-up table.
West County Reads book giveaway was once again a very popular component. By the end of the day we had distributed over 3,000 books to very happy children. We also distributed countless WCR bookmarks with tips for parents on how they can raise a reader, and the Spanish-English dictionaries we gave away to parents were also very popular. The interest in these dictionaries suggests we should seek additional funding to enable us to purchase more for future events. Robin Wilson and I had great help from some Cal student volunteers associated with Circle K and Alpha Phi Omega service fraternities. One of the students even stepped into the very august robes of the Reading Wizard in our storybook reading tent (Don Delcollo had another commitment, so we had to recruit an understudy).
Special thanks to Robin (and her husband) for helping to set up and carry out the event. And thanks again to Prospect Sierra for the books and to the WCCUSD (with the help of Marin Trujillo) for the banners.
The event provided a wonderful “book end” (pun intended) to the prior week’s successful book drive at Prospect Sierra, as the books we distributed came directly from that effort.
– Kevin Hufferd, Chair, West County Reads
