Belonging Through Books

Representation matters. Every child deserves to see themselves, their cultures, and their families authentically represented in the stories they read. However, many students do not always have access to storybooks with diverse casts of characters and plots — that’s where the Belonging Through Books Project comes in!

Funded by a RemotEDx grant from the Ohio Department of Education, the priority of this project is to ensure that 36 school libraries in Central Ohio’s most diverse school districts have books that authentically represent the students they serve.

Each school chooses the books that are right for their students from a curated list of over 150 diverse and inclusive storybooks written by authors from all walks of life.

Each book is accompanied by a resource guide to help foster healthy discussions with students and families. Our educational consultants have also created a series of professional learning courses for educators at participating schools to have all of the tools and resources they need to guide authentic discussions regarding the topics covered in the books.

Each school determines the exact book selection for their school and we provide the resources they need to integrate that story into their lessons.

Digital Read-Alouds

To ensure students have access to quality stories outside of school, we have worked with many of the authors and publishers from our book list to produce a series of digital read-alouds!

Each video features close-ups of the book being read so viewers can follow along and enjoy the illustrations.

Go to the Belong Through Books YouTube playlist.

About our partners

Teacher Campus is an online subscription-based professional learning platform for educators.

This collaborative effort from WOSU, SOITA, and CET seeks to provide high-quality, personalized learning opportunities to early childhood and K-12 educators through a mix of self-paced and live virtual courses covering a variety of topics from social-emotional skills, lesson development, and technology integration. Learn more at teachercampus.org.

RemotEDx is a state-level initiative that brings together a mix of remote, hybrid, and blended learning partners from across the state to help schools enhance, expand, and more effectively scale high-quality remote, hybrid, and blended education delivery models.

RemotEDx recently awarded subgrants to nonprofit and community-based organizations partnering with schools to help improve, enhance and enrich remote caring, teaching, and learning opportunities for Ohio’s most underserved students.

The Belonging Through Books project was one of 17 projects chosen from a pool of 150 applications.