Spreading Sunshine

By John A. Sellers, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 5/1/2008

When New York City residents look at the nighttime skyline next week, they may notice the Empire State Building lit up in yellow. The reason? Mayor Michael Bloomberg has officially declared May 5–12 to be Project Sunshine Week, in honor of the 10-year-old nonprofit organization that connects hospitalized children worldwide with visiting volunteers, celebrities and others. And one of the group’s new programs, the Project Sunshine Book Club, has close connections to children’s publishing.

The Empire State Building during 2007's Project Sunshine Week.
Photo courtesy Project Sunshine.

Author Sally Cook (Hey Batta Batta Swing!) had been volunteering with Project Sunshine for a year when she was asked by the nonprofit’s founder, Joseph M. Weilgus, to head up the program. During visits, authors and illustrators read from their books, discuss their writing/drawing processes and sign books for and take pictures with patients. Among the dozen authors who have signed on with the club are Brian Collier, Doreen Cronin, Sonia Manzano and Mary Pope Osborne. Publishers donate copies of the participants’ books to remain with patients once the author has left.

The Book Club officially launched this past February, and has since sent three authors to area hospitals—Roxie Munro, R.L. Stine and Sally Lloyd-Jones. During Project Sunshine Week, Cook will read at NYU’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine on May 5, and during Project Sunshine’s annual gala and dinner at the Waldorf Astoria on May 12 (the organization’s major fundraising event for the year), the Book Club will conduct auctions for a basket of donated books and a dinner for an adult and four children with Stine at Redeye Grill in New York City.

Sally Lloyd-Jones (r.), author of How to Be a Baby by Me, the Big Sister (Random / Schwartz & Wade) with Project Sunshine's Margaux Neiderbach (l.) and patient Markell at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.

According to Margaux Neiderbach, general manager at Project Sunshine, the Book Club is a natural extension of the nonprofit’s preexisting Book Buddies program, through which volunteers read to children in hospitals and medical facilities, but with a meaningful difference. “It’s like having a celebrity come visit,” she says, noting that many of the children who receive visits have never met an author or illustrator before. “To have the authors who wrote the book read their book and tell about how it was put together is really a very special experience. The authors just bring such positive joy and energy when they read.”

Going forward, the Book Club aims to send an author or illustrator to a hospital once or twice per month and increase its roster of participants to around 20. “The more often we do this, the more we’re asked [to return],” says Neiderbach, adding that the typical feedback they receive after an event is, “It means so much to our kids—when can you come back?”

For Cook, the work that she, her colleagues at Project Sunshine and the participating authors have put into the club has been well worth the effort. “I’ve gotten far more out of this than I ever expected,” she says, adding that these visits are a natural match with the events authors and illustrators already do. “We go into schools and libraries all the time—why not hospitals?”

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