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A PeaceHealth hospital in Springfield, Oregon, and a standalone medical center in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, are among ministry facilities that are helping families to focus early on literacy. PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend and the foundation of Saint Francis Healthcare System are enrolling interested parents in programs that provide a series of free books to children from infancy until age 5.

Josie Hall, community health coordinator for the PeaceHealth Oregon network, says providing families with access to free books on an ongoing basis "can promote early literacy and hopefully a love for reading."

Imagination Library
PeaceHealth Sacred Heart is asking new parents if they'd like to sign up for the Imagination Library program. Through that program, children receive a free book in the mail each month until they are 5 years old. They get to keep all the books.

Hall says the Western Oregon hospital decided to get involved in enrolling newborns "so that the kids can enjoy participating in the program for their entire eligibility period," from birth to age 5. She says through Imagination Library the kids who enroll get access to numerous books.

Dolly Parton founded the Imagination Library book-gifting initiative in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up. The program expanded quickly and is now available in communities across the United States as well as in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom. Imagination Library mails out about 2 million books each month. Philanthropists fund the program.

Host organizations bring the Imagination Library program to local communities. The Eugene, Oregon, Public Library Foundation brought the Imagination Library program to Lane County, Oregon, where PeaceHealth Sacred Heart is located, in 2014. Through the library foundation and other organizations, all children up to age 5 in Lane County can enroll in Imagination Library.

Former Eugene City Manager Jon Ruiz supports Imagination Library and is a member of PeaceHealth Oregon's Community Health Board. He had asked leadership with PeaceHealth Sacred Heart in Springfield whether the hospital would want to partner with the Eugene Public Library Foundation to help enroll newborns in Imagination Library, and they said yes.

Karen Galloway is a hospital volunteer dedicated to the Imagination Library effort. Since March, she has visited the hospital rooms of new parents and their babies to explain the program and help them enroll.

She says as a retired elementary teacher, "I know how being exposed to books and being read to can help prepare a child to succeed in school. Happily, these new parents understand the benefits and are eager to enroll." In April alone, she signed up 45 families.

The books children receive are tailored to their age. The first book they get is The Little Engine That Could. Among the books babies are getting this year are Sleep Tight, Polar Bear; Babies Love Animals and Baby! Talk! Books for older children this year include Llama Llama Red Pajama, Dandelion Magic and Milo's Hat Trick.

Reach Out and Read
Saint Francis Foundation, the fundraising arm of Saint Francis Healthcare, is seeking dollars for the Reach Out and Read program it launched in April. The initiative offers free books to pediatric patients at well-child visits at certain Saint Francis Healthcare System facilities in Cape Girardeau and nearby Jackson, Missouri.

Saint Francis offers the program through a partnership with Reach Out and Read, a national nonprofit founded in 1989 to help families make reading a part of their routines and to supply the books they need to get started. Pediatricians at health care facilities in all 50 states — Catholic health facilities among them — inform their patients' parents about the Reach Out and Read program. Reach Out and Read provides books to 4.2 million children nationwide. Two-thirds of book recipients come from low-income families.

Saint Francis's nonprofit partner provided an online training course to Saint Francis clinicians taking part in the program. In the training, they learned to talk to parents about the importance of reading to children.

Dr. Julie Benard, a Saint Francis pediatrician, explains that during the training, clinicians were encouraged to discuss with families that the most important time for language development is between 6 months and 5 years. Benard says the trainers also recommended clinicians talk about the fact that parents can take a very active role in helping their children develop their language skills. "Reading to children provides a language-rich environment and exposes them to countless words, which promotes language development and learning," she says.

Those in the training course also learned about age-appropriate uses for books. For instance, a 6- to 9-month-old may be more interested in holding a book and chewing on it, which may be discouraging to parents because they may feel the child is not actively engaged in listening to the story. But those in the online training course discussed that those children are still exploring the world with their mouths and this behavior is normal.

"Even pointing out a couple of pictures in a book before the baby takes it and chews on it increases their language development," Benard notes. She adds that a 12- to 15-month-old may only sit for a few pages or a few minutes of a story, and this is also normal, so even just reading a couple of pages before a child toddles off is meaningful in their language development.

At families' 6-month well-child visits at the participating clinics, clinicians bring a children's book to the discussion and families that want to join Reach Out and Read get to take the book home to keep. The families then get to pick out a new free book at each well-child visit until the child is 5, for a total of nine books.

As a Reach Out and Read affiliate, Saint Francis gets discounts on age-appropriate books from the Scholastic bookseller. Saint Francis picks out and orders the books on an online portal, then the books arrive at Saint Francis organized in age categories. Families can pick out their selections. Cape Girardeau business owners Jason and Lesley Coalter provided the startup funding, and the Saint Francis Foundation is seeking donations for the $15,000 needed to maintain the program in the coming year.

Among the favorites that families have selected from the book choices are Leo Gets a Checkup, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Goodnight Moon, Giraffes Can't Dance and Freight Train!

Program organizers at Saint Francis say at the pediatric offices that hand out the books, the whole office "lights up when we get a new book, and everyone is excited to look through them."

Staff members like to think about which children on the schedule the next day will be perfect for the new dinosaur book or train book or animal book that has just arrived.