Last week, WNDB was proud beyond words toannounce the Walter Dean Myers Award and Grant program, named after the beloved award-winning author. This week, we’re launching our inaugural Indiegogo campaign (note that the site will go live at 10/23 at 9pm EST at http://igg.me/at/diversebooks) to help fund “The Walter” and our other exciting initiatives, including our Diversity in the Classroom program, our Educational Kits for teachers, librarians and booksellers, and our 2016 Diversity Festival.And this is where we need your help to spread the word. Thus far, our all-volunteer team has done amazing things on moxie and individual donations alone, but we cannot reach the next level by ourselves. We would appreciate anything you could do to signal boost and bring awareness to the campaign.
How can you help? We know that not everyone has the resources to donate, so we’ve tried to make it easy for anyone to participate:
Feel free to share this e-mail with your family and friends, including a personal message describing why the campaign is important to you!
Participate in our cue card contest to emphasize why you #SupportWNDB, whether it’s for yourself, because of a family member, or because of a diverse book that changed your life. Create your own sign or use the templates we’ve created (http://weneedwndb.local/cue-cards/) and submit pictures to our Tumblr. The photos with the most reblogs will win a WNDB prize pack.
Join us on Twitter for #k8chat on Thursday, October 23rd at 9pm EST. At the same time, we’ll send out an e-mail update announcing the “soft-launch” of our Indiegogo campaign so members of our mailing list will be able to get first crack at some of our incredible perks, including:
journals signed by our advisory board
critiques from top agents
5 prints signed by Dav Pilkney (of Captain Underpants fame) and
limited edition WNDB holiday cards which will include artwork by six diverse artists, including team member Don Tate (right). So we can get the cards to you by December, we’ll have a small print run of 500 sets that will be available for the first two weeks of the campaign ONLY.
Use the #SupportWNDB hashtag in a Twitter hashtag party this Friday, October 24th at 1pm EST, and please RT to your heart’s delight!
Truly, anything you can do to spread the word will help. We so appreciate your support – we’ve said it before but we’ll say it again: We’re a grassroots organization, so by definition, we owe our success to you.
limited edition WNDB holiday cards which will include artwork by 
