The youth members of the Belmopan Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program (BYSEP) regularly do service-oriented projects to help their community. They discuss issues that their community is facing and how they can solve them. During one of these discussions (in May 2018), the youth decided to take on the goal of making reading fun and help encourage a love for reading in Belizean children and teens.
There is no doubt that there is a connection between early reading and later success with comprehension, language development, creativity, and academics. Reading fiction also gives children in tough situations a chance to escape. When the BYSEP youth consulted about how to encourage young people to read more, they realized that there is limited access to selections of affordable and entertaining books. As a result, for many children, the only books they see are their school books. Because of this, reading can be seen as boring and not something to do in their free time. The youth decided that they needed to find a way to get fun books into young people’s homes and created the various events to make that happen.
The group decided that maybe if children and teens in Belize had access to FUN books they would start reading more and see reading as FUN!
They started requesting new and used children’s/teen books from organizations and groups in the US and quickly collected over 3,500 books. To distribute the books, they decided to create a fun free book festival where families could bring their children to play games and win books. The festival was a huge success and the “Tek Time fi Read” (Kriol for “Take time to read”) event became an on-going project that went on to:
- bring over 11,000 children’s books into the country
- hold another giant book festival in Belmopan
- renovate the Belmopan library
- hold a library open day and book fair at the Belmopan library
- hold a book festival in the village of Seine Bight
- distribute thousands of books to families, schools, libraries, and other programs.
- win the National Youth Award’s “Volunteerism” award for this and other projects they do