🌟 BIG NEWS 🌟 Books for Keeps is a 2026 Georgia Reads Community Honoree!

Books for Keeps, alongside our partners at the Clarke County School District and Creature Comforts Brewing Company's Get Comfortable Fund, are proud to be honored as a 2026 Georgia Reads Community by the Georgia Council on Literacy.

The Georgia Reads award recognizes the power of community partnerships in creating significant improvements in literacy across Georgia. Books for Keeps was honored alongside the nine other honorees at the Georgia State Capitol on March 3 (Georgia Reads Day) for our Storytellers Literacy Mentor Program.

Storytellers began when Books for Keeps, and our program partners of Get Comfortable and CCSD, answered the urgent need for literacy support in our community. Storytellers matches students in 1st-3rd grade with trained volunteer mentors to provide one-on-one early reading and literacy support through twice-weekly 30-minute sessions during the school day. And, it has had exceedingly positive results! Our partner schools and students have shown a large-scale increase for on-level reading over the three years of the program. We expect that trend to continue this school year (2025-2026) as well.

The whole team at Books for Keeps, and at CCSD and Get Comfortable, are thrilled that the Georgia Council on Literacy has recognized the important literacy work Storytellers does in our community by recognizing us as a Georgia Reads Community.

Want to learn more? Read the Georgia Reads press release here.

L to R: Dr. Ruthi Hortsch (BFK), Malcolm Mitchell (Georgia Reads) , James Barlament (CCSD), Brooke Nitkowski (Get Comfortable)