With a $10,000 donation, a group of literary agents is helping children’s organizations purchase and distribute books to school libraries across the U.S. On January 7, during a livestreamed gathering, the Children’s Book Council and the Impact and Legacy Fund of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators announced the gift from the Literary Agent Circle of Sponsors. The amount will be added to the $15,000 raised by the ILF on Giving Tuesday during December.

The Circle of Sponsors formed last year as a branch of the CBC’s 501c3 nonprofit, Every Child a Reader. Agents in the circle help raise funds for literacy and the freedom to read, and in this case the full sponsorship will go to under-resourced school libraries throughout 2026. The ILF’s All Readers Welcome program will disburse the funds.

CBC executive director Carl Lennertz said the fundraising plan arose from past collaboration between Every Child a Reader and ILF managing director Lin Oliver. “Lin and I first spoke a year ago, when the ILF gave us money for shipping 5,000 books to the L.A. fire recovery schools, through Children’s Book World,” Lennertz told the virtual gathering of CBC, ILF, and LACS. “That’s where we first got serious about talking about other things to do” to help young readers.

“Rather than each organization starting its own siloed program, we’re joining forces” to support student literacy and oppose censorship, Oliver said. “Together, we have $25,000 to buy and ship books to school libraries, and for so many kids, their first and main contact with books is at the school library, just down the hall.”

The grand total will be divided into grants of $1,000–$1,500 in the year ahead. Grants are awarded to applicants on a quarterly, rolling basis, under the auspices of the ILF’s flagship program, All Readers Welcome. Founded in 2022 by author Federico Erebia, All Readers Welcome developed after an earlier ILF micro-grant program received a strong response from librarians in need.

Oliver added that ILF partner Bookelicious, an online book-discovery platform for educators and families, subsidizes All Readers Welcome’s shipping costs. Libraries “order the books through a curated list of hundreds of books that have received critical acclaim,” Oliver said, and Bookelicious handles distribution at “a huge discount” for the charitable program. To qualify for the selected list, a book must have received media or community praise, and although a book “doesn’t have to represent a marginalized population, we favor books that do, so that we can serve the whole school,” Oliver said.

The need is significant, and the ILF aims for broad geographic representation. More than 300 school libraries applied in the past year, Oliver said, and after all applications were reviewed by a committee of children’s book specialists, ILF had sufficient funding to serve seven of them in 2025. Recent recipients include the reservation school in Flathead, Mont.; a border school in Naco, Ariz., that “doubled the size of their library” and made repairs with a grant; and an El Centro, Calif., juvenile detention center, a facility housing more than 160 incarcerated young people that was “able to triple the size of their library” with $1,500, Oliver explained.

A little goes a long way, she said, “and the hardest part of this program is selecting the schools. Since libraries don’t have money to buy new books, their collections are old; there was one school that had no books published before their school population was born, reading books about science that were published in 1983.” Oliver expressed hope that All Readers Welcome can begin to remedy some of those challenges, and that work with Every Child a Reader and LACS is just getting started. “We’d like to be able to serve the global community.”