ROCHESTER, N.Y. — For the first time ever, the Rochester Children’s Book Festival brought the celebration to the Rochester Institute of Technology, where area authors and organizations have been working to bring the love of reading to more public city school children.

“One of the other leaders of the Rochester Children’s Book Festival said, you know, ‘I’m seeing a lot of suburban kids here,’ and she wanted to bring it to city schools,” said Vivian Vande Velde, a local author and coordinator for Festival to Go.

The idea for a mobile “festival to go in” as a way to bring books to children in lower income schools was first sparking in 2004. With the help of Altrusa International of Rochester, a nonprofit focused on community service and literacy, the goal has expanded to bring books to public city school libraries in hopes of reaching even more children. 

“If we can get books out and in the hands of the children, hopefully somebody at the household is going to start reading them,” said Liz Finnegan, a member of Altrusa International of Rochester.

And in the effort to get as many books to as many children as possible, Altrusa partnered with the Rochester Children’s Book Festival to hold a gently used book drive at the event in order to continue to accumulate as many books as possible to be donated to city school libraries.

"The librarians and teachers would tell us that the kids, after seeing the authors, were really excited about coming to the library and getting the books out,” Finnegan said.

“A lot of the suburban kids, the suburban parents and their relatives, are really eager to get books into the hands of kids,” Vande Velde said. “Sometimes city parents, it could be a single parent situation, it could be a two or three job situation, where the parent doesn’t necessarily have the time to do that.”

It made the book drive important for not only the school libraries, but for the future of children in them.

“Read to your children,” said Finnegan. “Once they learn to read they can do most anything.”