Cindy's Featured Artist of the Week - Fade to Read

FADE TO READ

Finding purpose through their pain is Samantha Boyd and Shiree Turner Fowler’s reason for beginning their program FadetoRead. In January 2012, Samantha Boyd’s brother was sentenced to forty years in prison and in December 2015, Shiree Fowler’s brother was shot and killed. Boyd and Fowler decided to take their pain and beautifully transform into a program that would give the scholars in their community access to the world of reading. 

These two teachers of kindergarten and fifth-grade boys understand that our scholars who are not reading, proficiently, by the third grade have difficulty achieving their ultimate potential. With this understanding, their ultimate goal is to provide their scholars with a literacy rich educational experience that will allow our scholars to reach their fullest potential and one that will provide them with an education that will, hopefully, prevent them from sharing the fates of their beloved brothers.

Fade to Read is a program that places books in barbershops. The name, Fade to Read, is based on the popular fade haircut. A fade is the perfect blending of hair where there are no definitive lines. This is similar to the mission of Fade to Read. Boyd and Fowler want to instill a love of reading within young people by perfectly blending who they are as readers into who they are as individuals. They believe that there should be no definitive lines between their self-identities and their reading identities. Both of these identities should fade into one another. However, Boyd and Fowler are not only trying to positively impact the literacy realities of the young male scholars in SC. They also have a program called Curl Up With a Book. This program places books inside of SC beauty salons.

Boyd and Fowler believe that when our scholars see themselves in the books they read, they can see who they can become. Because of this firm belief, the books that are placed in the barbershops and beauty shops are not the popular children’s books. The books that the scholars access in the shops are ones that include characters of color and/or written by authors of color.

The beauty of this program is the community that has been established not just locally, but nationally. The majority of the books that have been placed in the shops have been donated by authors and community members. The community also came together and fully funded two GoFundMe campaigns. Because of this establishment of community, Boyd and Fowler have been able to place book boxes in shops in North Carolina and Washington State. They like it known that FadetoRead and Curl Up With a Book are not for profit or non-profit; these programs are for community profit.

                           

Phone number: 864-404-1098
Email: Fade2read@gmail.com