Did you know that 61 percent of families with young children and living in poverty have no books in the house?

Thursday is the Literacy Banquet of the DeKalb/Sycamore Bookcase Project. Full disclosure, I am on the steering committee for this local nonprofit. But that is because it is a cause I believe in – the importance of not only teaching children to read but teaching them to love to read.

Each year, the Bookcase Project builds 50 handcrafted, solid-oak two-shelf bookcases for children in the Two Rivers Head Start program. Each bookcase has a nameplate engraved with the child’s name and comes with a starter library of preschool-level books.