KinderHarvest rescues and recycles children's and other consumer magazines that would otherwise be discarded and destroyed, and distributes them to:
- schools & libraries
- early learning & after-school centers
- food banks, pantries & kitchens
- homeless & domestic violence shelters
- disaster relief programs, and
- other local literacy programs.
KinderHarvest collects recycled magazines across the entire magazine supply chain - Publishers, National Distributors, Wholesalers, Retail Newsstands, and Consumers. The magazines are given to new readers - children and families faced with economic challenges who are unable to receive them via traditional consumer channels.
Children's magazines are a compelling reading resource for children - colorful, engaging, educational, and something they can call their own. KinderHarvest joins publishers and hunger relief programs to put magazines into the hands, homes, and hearts of children, so that families can know the joy of reading together.
MagazineLiteracy.org is working with publishers, newsstands, food banks, and other community agencies to put magazines and groceries together to feed children and families hungry to read. A partnership between the wonderful Moo-Cow Fan Club magazine and the New Hampshire Food Bank distributed magazines to hungry families in grocery bags and backpacks filled with food.
 KinderHarvest web applications are powered by ThinkHost - a green web server run completely on solar and wind energy.
Global Magazine Recycling Initiative Seeks a Million Magazines from Schools, Worldwide
Education, literacy, and magazine leaders are marking the sixth anniversary of Children’s Magazine Month this October by mobilizing teachers, librarians, and school children, worldwide, to organize KinderHarvest magazine recycling projects to collect millions of magazines for new readers. The magazines recycled by school children in their classrooms and school libraries will be given to other children and families in nearby homeless and domestic violence shelters, and to food pantries for distribution inside bags of groceries. Local organizers will create and decorate KinderHarvest bins from recycled boxes, and post stories and photographs about their magazine recycling projects online at childmagmonth.org. The project will grow throughout the school year, culminating with a tally of the number of magazines recycled to new readers on Earth Day 2008.
 Here are some next steps for organizing your own KinderHarvest magazine collection:
FIND LOCAL LITERACY NEEDS - Reach out to agencies in your community that help children and families and can use the magazines (e.g. food pantries; homeless shelters; domestic violence shelters; early learning or after-school programs; job training programs; senior centers, etc.).
CREATE COLLECTION BINS - Create and decorate collection bins made from recycled boxes. Be creative and make it fun. Send photos to childmagmonth.org to share with others.
COLLECT THE MAGAZINES - Publicize the collection and bin locations in your school. Encourage students and families to donate recent, gently used magazines. It's best if donors don't tear the magazine covers to remove their mailing label. If it's a paper label, it should be gently removed. If it's printed on the magazine, then cross out the name and address. Place new gift labels on each magazine in the same spot.
SORT & DELIVER THE MAGAZINES - Sort the magazines and count the number of magazines recycled by category. Some locations can use any type of magazine. Others will prefer certain categories. Send counts of the number of magazines delivered to each location by category to childmagmonth.org to add to the global tally.
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Download and publish this KinderHarvest PSA ad - It makes a great flyer too!
Read more about how you can organize a KinderHarvest magazine collection in your own school, neighborhood, or community. Also, check out the Magazine Literacy Bee, where volunteers post stories about their own projects as examples for others to replicate in their communities. [more details] [see blog]
- Find a program in your community to receive the magazines you collect. This could be a food pantry, a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, an early learning program like Headstart, or other after-school, reading, or literacy program. Find out how many people are served by the program, including their age, gender, and interests or needs in terms of the types of magazines. There are many online and community directories for these programs. Please be in touch if you need help finding programs to receive the magazines that you collect.
- Collect recent issues of gently used magazines. Think of collection points that are convenient for your neighbors - places where people go on a regular and frequent basis, such as the public library, a book or magazine store, a school, church, bank, or supermarket. Ask permission to set up a KinderHarvest magazine literacy collection bin. Think about where else you could collect recent magazines. For example, perhaps a supermarket would allow a magazine drive, which is very similar to a food drive. Shoppers receive a small flyer on the way into the grocery store announcing the magazine drive and can drop newly purchased magazines in a bin or cart on the way out of the store. Consumers can be encouraged to come back to drop-off their recent issue magazines from home.
- Remove labels from magazines, or use a black permanent marker to blot out names and addresses. Then, print and post our magazine gift label in the same spot where the old label was. This protects the magazine donors privacy, while giving the magazine to someone as something they can call their very own. Read more about how to organize your magazines for delivery.
- Deliver the magazines that you collect to the receiving program on a timely basis. Gather feedback from the program director so we can improve and grow the KinderHarvest program.
Communicate what you are planning or what you have accomplished to the local media, so that others will learn about, support, and be inspired by your good work.
- Contact us to let us know if you would write about the planning, organization, and execution of your project in our MagazineLiteracy.org ideas blog. This will also help to inspire and guide others who would like to organize a successful KinderHarvest magazine collection in their own school or community.
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