Focus IBBY

Focus IBBY Liz Page (bio) 2020 will be remembered as the year when our world turned upside down. Across the globe, friends and colleagues are working from home, practicing self-isolation, and learning how to use the latest technology as we try to keep in touch and fulfill our mission of bringing books and children together. It is a challenge! But one that IBBY members have risen to meet. Sadly, the 2020 Bologna Children’s Book Fair had to be canceled because of the corona-virus pandemic, so the biggest test for IBBY International this year was how to announce the winners of our 2020 awards: the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award, and the IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promoter Award. IBBY will make a digital announcement to present the awards on Monday, May 4, 2020. Because these have to be prerecorded, we will be able to share the announcements for months, if not years, to come. Digital meetings will be held, video conferences will be set up, and the Internet will be used in many different ways; we are experimenting and finding ways to stay in to contact. When this emergency is over, we will have much to do and we will need all of your support and dedication to give the children back this time when they have been without school, without their friends, and without easy access to reading and books. The Child’s Right to Become a Reader—The IBBY Yamada Program In 2005, IBBY launched a campaign to draw attention to the right of every child to become a reader. With the generous funding of the Yamada Bee Farm, the IBBY-Yamada Fund was established to provide funds for IBBY projects that help develop a book culture for children in all regions of the world. Each year, projects are developed by IBBY members and presented to the executive committee. The projects selected thus far have included reading promotion programs, establishing libraries in schools and community centers, training teachers and parents in maintaining libraries and storytelling, and workshops for writers, illustrators, and editors of children's books. For the 2020 projects, the sponsor, the Yamada Bee Farm, has generously increased the funding to US$7,500 for each project. We are very grateful to the sponsor for this amazing support that IBBY has received since 2006. Because of restrictions imposed by banks and the 2020 pandemic, some [End Page 86] of these projects will be postponed until 2021. Others are going ahead. The projects supported in 2020 and 2021 are as follows: Argentina: Workshop on the use of books in hospitals, including a writers’ workshop, the creation of a small library, and training in bibliotherapy. Armenia: Reading promotion activities and workshops in rural areas. Bolivia: The challenge of reading where there are no books: using books in schools and creating a library. Costa Rica: Los libros violetas: Promoting gender equity in thirty Costa Rican public schools through children’s literature. El Salvador: Reading Is Marvelous: the objective is to help children develop reading habits, to encourage them to develop as independent thinkers, and to support them in writing down their own experiences. Indonesia: Workshop on trauma healing for activists in community libraries in the Ring of Fire region. Lebanon: Promoting reading among children with special needs. Nepal: Developing wordless picturebooks for Nepalese children. Peru: Vengan los niños y niñas a pescar historias en el mar de Chorillos: a project aimed at preschool children from age three to five; children engage in workshops where they will “fish up” their experiences in the creation of stories. South Africa: Pan-African content creation workshop, with Book Dash, that will provide approximately thirty-five creators from across the African continent with the opportunity to collaborate on new African children’s books. Sri Lanka: Kathandara Kadalla—Story Nest: incorporates activities and training to revive the art of storytelling in preschools. We will be posting the reports from the projects on the IBBY website as they come in. The IBBY-Yamada program is one of the most exciting projects in IBBY’s vast array of activities. This grass-roots activity reaches many children and helps...