For the third year in a row, Orca Book Publishers, an independently owned book publisher based in Victoria, has donated almost 6,000 books to the three 1000x5 Children’s Book Recycling Projects.
More later about the project, a local initiative supported by Victoria, Saanich and Sooke school districts, but first why would a business like Orca do this?
That’s like asking why would a publisher of children’s’ books want to encourage young readers. The question answers itself.
It is a generous participation in child growth and development, but it’s also a good business decision by Orca, and that is just the way it should be.
It is an excellent example of what can happen when business folks look beyond the immediate bottom line and imagine a future market for their product.
The business of business is, after all, business. Yet there is a tendency among non-business folks, some educators among them, to perceive free enterprise, as Winston Churchill put it, as a predatory tiger rather than as a horse pulling the economic cart.
Consequently, when a business comes forward offering financial support to public education, it is viewed with suspicion by non-business folks.
With a projected shortfall in its operating budget of between $12 million and $16 million, the Vancouver School Board recently turned down an offer from Chevron of $475,000, which would have created a fund to which teachers could have applied to support math and science projects.
The deal was that the board would have access to $1 for every 30 litres of gas bought at local Chevron stations.
Was this just a marketing strategy? Of course and why not? In all likelihood, Chevron would have sold that gas anyway, since that is the business they are in, so why not tie it to something that might benefit the local school system?
But no, ideologues opposed accepting benevolence from a multinational purveyor of gasoline. To do so would have betrayed the school district’s green agenda, according to some.
It’s like saying the South Island school districts should not accept Orca’s generosity because children’s books are partly to blame for defoliating the forest.
Most of the people who supported the Vancouver board’s green position, including some members of the teachers’ association, drove to those meetings in their own cars, but that’s an irony for another column.
Maybe it’s time for educational leaders to move away from regarding the corporate world as a haven for greed and, heaven help us, profit, and think about the possibilities and advantages to both the corporate and education worlds of a closer relationship.
In England, the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology is funded by government but with substantial support from the British Record Industry Trust.
Why would the recording industry support this school financially? Graduates from the BRIT School include Adele, Amy Winehouse, Katy Melua and a slew of others who went on to make big money for the recording industry.
Now let’s get back to Orca and how it has been an enabler for the 1000x5 Childrens’ Book Recycling Project.
In the past eight years, the project has put 181,000 books, at no cost to parents, into the hands of children up to the age of five. Think about that and what the project, with support from Orca, has accomplished both in terms of creating readers and fostering school readiness for those kids.
Government has a role to play here as well. The connections between business and education need to be brokered by someone who should be able to imagine the possibilities and offer incentives.
Government is obviously that someone.
Corporations cannot be expected to ante up to support schools unless they can foresee some clear mid-term or long-term advantages to their business interests.
If Orca and the 1000x5 can show government how that can be done, maybe others will follow.
Parents can get books by contacting:[email protected].
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
