Upstairs at the Fairhope Public Library, on Wednesday mornings, a small group of volunteers gathers around sewing machines and embroidery hoops and goes to work on a problem most people don’t think about until their children are already in school: how do you get a baby’s parents reading aloud on day one?
The answer they’ve settled on involves burp cloths — hundreds of them, each one hemmed, serged and embroidered with the words “Read to Me” — packed into gift bags and delivered to the Birth Center at Thomas Hospital in Fairhope, where they go home with roughly 135 newborns every month.
The project is called RAISE-A-READER, and it is run by the Friends of the Fairhope Library, a volunteer support group that raises money and provides community services for the Fairhope Public Library. If Baldwin County’s adult literacy rate really does sit several points above Alabama’s statewide average of 86 percent, as county-by-county comparisons suggest, the Friends would be the first to say the seeds of that advantage are planted at birth — literally, in this case, one stitched cotton square at a time.
What goes in the bag
Each gift bag is assembled to do more than decorate a nursery. Phylis Fritchen, the coordinator of the RAISE-A-READER project, walks visitors through the contents like a checklist of early-literacy essentials: a board book or two sized for small hands, an informational booklet, a bookmark, a sample library card application and even a sample library card so the real thing doesn’t feel intimidating later.
“We include a board book or two, a booklet, a bookmark, a sample library card application and a sample library card,” Fritchen said. “We also add items from the Alabama Department of Public Health — fliers about the dangers to babies of secondhand smoke, babies’ sleeping safety and other information that new parents need to know.”
That blend of literacy and public health materials is deliberate. New parents at a hospital bedside are a captive, exhausted and receptive audience, and the Friends have learned to make the most of the moment. The bags also carry enrollment materials for the Baldwin County chapter of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the free book-mailing program that sends an age-appropriate title to enrolled children every month from birth until age five — so a family that fills out the paperwork in the hospital can have books arriving at the house before the baby’s first pediatric checkup.
The production line behind it is almost entirely donated. Educational fliers come from the Alabama Partnership for Children, the Montgomery-based nonprofit that coordinates early-childhood programs across the state. The Fairhope Rotary Noon Club supplies the blue bags themselves, each one printed with the club’s gold wheel. And the burp cloths are cut, serged and embroidered by a rotating cast of Friends volunteers who meet weekly upstairs at the library.
The volunteers at the machines
On a recent Wednesday, volunteers Pat Nist, Marti Hash and Sandy Hill were bent over their work, finishing a batch of cloths while Fritchen laid out the bags’ contents on the worktable. None of it is glamorous. Serging machines throw thread. Embroidery takes patience. But the arithmetic is impressive: at roughly 135 bags a month, the group assembles more than 1,600 gift bags a year, which comes close to keeping pace with the more than 1,400 babies born at Thomas Hospital annually.
In other words, nearly every family delivering at Fairhope’s hospital is now handed a small, stitched invitation to read aloud — a prompt that costs the hospital nothing and the Friends only fabric, thread and time.
The project has deep roots. It was launched years ago modeled on Books for Babies, a program sponsored by the national Friends of Libraries USA organization, with the explicit goals of encouraging parents to read to their children, promoting literacy, introducing families to the library’s children’s section and getting young families through the library’s doors. Hospital staff say the early reading message matters: reading aloud to a newborn helps build the speaking and listening skills that underpin everything a child does in school later, and it starts a habit that is far easier to establish at two days old than at two years.
“There are many activities at the Library in addition to RAISE-A-READER that welcome volunteers, so calling the Library’s number is a good way to start,” said Marti Hash, still stitching as she talked.
Why start at birth
The research behind the project’s premise is well established among literacy educators. Children who are read to regularly from infancy arrive at kindergarten with larger vocabularies, longer attention spans and more familiarity with printed language than children who are not. The gap shows up early and compounds for years. Public health officials have made the same case in campaigns built around the simple instruction to read to your child every day.
What makes the Fairhope version notable is the delivery mechanism. School readiness programs, pre-K seats and tutoring all arrive after the fact. A burp cloth embroidered with “Read to Me” is sitting in the hospital room before the family has ever driven the baby home, and it keeps working long after the books are shelved — every relative who sees it gets the message, and every laundry cycle renews it.
Michael Neeley, president of the RAISE-A-READER program, said the volunteers’ output still amazes him. “I am truly amazed by what they accomplish each month to support literacy for young children,” he said.
Part of a bigger literacy pipeline
RAISE-A-READER is now one strand in a coordinated web of early-literacy efforts in Baldwin County. The same Friends of the Fairhope Library group has donated $10,000 to the Baldwin County Imagination Library, the local affiliate of the program that mails books monthly to enrolled children countywide, and the Raise-A-Reader bags carry pre-addressed envelopes so that a family’s Imagination Library application goes straight to the program’s county coordinators without the parents having to find a stamp.
The effect is a kind of relay. The Friends hand the family a board book and an application at the hospital. The Imagination Library takes over from there, mailing a book every month until kindergarten. The public library stands by with story times, children’s programs and a card that was already in the bag. Each leg of the relay covers the gap left by the last one.
For a county that consistently tests above the state’s literacy average, none of this is a coincidence — and nobody involved pretends it is. Books in the home, adults who read to children and libraries that reach families early are precisely the inputs that literacy researchers say move the needle. Baldwin County just happens to have a room full of volunteers with sewing machines who understood that years ago.
How to help
The Friends of the Fairhope Library accept donations of board books, fabric and money for the project, and the Wednesday work sessions welcome new hands — no sewing experience required, though a tolerance for thread and a steady hand with an iron help. Volunteers interested in RAISE-A-READER or any of the library’s other programs can start by calling the Fairhope Public Library, which routes callers to the Friends group and its project coordinators.
The gift bags themselves are received at Thomas Hospital’s Birth Center by Birth Center Leader Victoria Nobles, RN, and her staff, who tuck them into the flow of discharge paperwork that follows every new family out the door. From there, the little blue bag with the gold Rotary wheel does the rest — a first book, a first library card and a two-word instruction sewn right into the fabric of the family’s new life: Read to Me.