Posts Tagged ‘events’

Our New Haven Reads 20th anniversary celebration certainly was “One for the Books!”

We welcomed 250 attendees to Bear’s Smokehouse Barbecue in New Haven and enjoyed dinner, drinks, and music by FaTE Band! It was a wonderful celebration of over twenty years of sharing the joy and power of reading. We have now served over 7,000 students and distributed over 2.5 million books since we began as a community book bank!

Our program included celebrating our Literacy Champion Honorees; Margie Gillis of Literacy How, Kim Healey, retired Executive Director of NewAlliance Foundation, and Senator Gary Winfield for their contributions to literacy at state and national levels.

Our Literacy Heroes were also honored for their partnership with New Haven Reads and their contributions to literacy in Greater New Haven. These honorees included: Yale University, The Study at Yale, Cindy Kissin, Claire Criscuolo, East Rock Magnet School, Seedlings Foundation, and the staff, Board, and volunteers.

We also heard from our first ever tutoring student, Josh Barber who appears in our anniversary video (watch it here!)

Thank you to everyone who attended and supported this event. We are so grateful for all our sponsors and community partners who made this event such a success. Check out our program here.

Want to read about the New Haven Independent’s coverage of the event? Check it out here.

Thank you to all of our amazing sponsors!

one for the books: Sponsors

Tags:20th anniversary, celebrate, events, one for the books
Posted in Blog, Home Page

“In the great tradition of the Spelling Bee, there was an amazing group of people, lots of laughter along with some great spelling that came together for a special evening!”
– Executive Director, Kirsten Levinsohn

The staff was thrilled to see all our families and friends log in at once and start chatting with each other and wave to familiar faces over zoom! Participants logged in from across the country and this is exactly what makes the virtual event so special!

It was so wonderful to see all our participants creative costumes, cool backgrounds, adorable pets, and neat Kahoot names pop up on our screens. As the night progressed, we had about 100 people join the Bee and 64 Kahoot players logged in. Some were individual players, others were family groups, and three families logged into zoom from their driveway and projected the event on a screen by a camp fire! They had to be both precise and speedy as they looked through four spelling variations of each word for the correct answer. We had winners from each round as well as overall winners!

Thanks to our Emcee, Ray Andrewsen, the night was filled with fun jokes and encouragement as the players strived for the top scores. Our Word Pronouncer, Shana Schneider did an excellent job at saying even the toughest words and made the night come to life with her cheerful voice and creative headbands! Thanks to all our supporters, we raised $17,570 in total!

We are so thankful to our Sponsors for supporting our programs through this event!