To celebrate International Literacy Day, an event that occurs on Sept. 8 each year, and the start of the new school year, the Whole Foods Market in West Windsor will join with MagazineLiteracy.org to kick-off the KinderHarvest magazine recycling drive for literacy. The event will take place during a special back-to-school tasting at the store on Thursday from 3 to 6 p.m.
This Whole Foods Market location will be the first in the nation to roll out the KinderHarvest magazine recycling drive for children and families learning to read. Wooden harvest bins will be placed in the store to collect the recycled magazines from consumers.
Residents are encouraged to drop-off their recent copies of gently used magazines, which will be recycled for reading by at-risk children and families in nearby homeless and domestic violence shelters, and delivered to families in grocery bags at food pantries. Children’s magazines are especially needed.
Based on this model effort, KinderHarvest will be expanded to other communities across the United States by the Magazine Publishers Family Literacy Project (MagazineLiteracy.org), a national program based in Princeton.
"KinderHarvest combines our dedication to a clean environment with our concern for a healthy community and breathes a new life into magazines that would otherwise be discarded and destroyed, said Melissa McDermott, marketing specialist at Whole Foods Market. "We are collecting magazines from those who love to read them and sending them to new readers," she added.
"KinderHarvest, the first effort of its kind, is like food gleaning, a practice that is thousands of years old, where crops left in the field are gathered by humanitarians to feed hungry people," said John Mennell, founding director of MagazineLiteracy.org. "Except that this harvest gleans magazines that would have ended up at the curb to feed children and families hungry to read and succeed, recycling the magazines we all love to meet local literacy needs. KinderHarvest combines the three R’s of education with the three R’s of recycling to promote the three R’s of magazine literacy: Read, Rescue, and Re-Use," he added.
The Magazine Publishers Family Literacy Project helps kids learn to read and build their self-esteem by organizing collaborative magazine industry, business and community partnerships that provide much needed magazines to schools, shelters, and other community literacy programs. The project strives to unleash the awesome potential of magazines as a powerful literacy resource for children and families.
On the Web: http://MagazineLiteracy.org.

