In the past three years, national non-profit organization First Book has provided children from low-income families with 20 million books nationwide.

Studies show that access to reading materials is one of the most pivotal aspects of literacy education, and First Book has set out to ensure that all children will be able to remember owning their first book, according to the organization’s Web site.

The UW-Eau Claire First Book College Advisory Board was founded by Don Mowry, director of service learning, in fall 2003.

The organization was brought to campus in order to benefit the community through the efforts of Eau Claire students, said board co-chair junior Jill Bryan.

“We try to raise as much to donate books to schools and programs who help low-income families,” Bryan said. “We stress the importance of having books in the home and reading them.”

This week, the advisory board will begin its first book distribution to students at six local elementary schools.

“We will be bringing a favorite book from our own childhoods, and we will try to stress the importance of reading to these children,” co-chair sophomore Danielle Kamba said.

The program’s 129 or so children will receive a book this month, and will be provided with a new book every month throughout the next school year, Bryan said.

Because First Book is specifically designed to support the services provided by existing local community programs, the advisory board chose three such programs: the Eau Claire Reading Partner program, Truax Head Start Center and Altoona Head Start Center.

These programs were able to choose from the thousands of available titles to give to their participating children.

Many publishers, namely Scholastic, work in conjunction with First Book to offer books at low prices, Bryan said.

Funds for the books were generated by a brat stand fund-raiser held in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, 3915 Gateway Drive, Kamba said. They also received grants from the national branch of the First Book organization.

“(First Book) gets money from everywhere and are very willing to give it away,” she said.

“A lot of these kids aren’t the best of readers and we just want to get them excited about literacy,” Kamba said.

Many of the participating children don’t have any books of their own, and they think that books are meant to be checked out from the library, read once and then returned, she added.

“One thing we really want to do at these book distributions is emphasize that these are (the children’s) books, they belong to them, and they should keep them and read them over and over again,” Kamba said.

“There is such a huge advantage to having access to literature at a young age,” Bryan said. “We basically want these underprivileged children to have the same advantages as the other children when they go to school.”