History
We are five years old this year and we celebrated our birthday with a big party at the Royal Festival Hall on 8 November 2007. Five years old. It doesn’t sound very grown up but we have achieved a great deal in those five short years…
The Reading Agency was formed in 2002 by merging three smaller agencies - LaunchPad, The Reading Partnership and Well Worth Reading. We were a bunch of activists with a common passion for libraries and reading.
We’ve come a long way in our five years and disproved all those that told us that most mergers fail. We’ve established ourselves as a respected and viable reading development agency and are involved in some exciting stuff.
We run a potent, magical mixture of big national partnership schemes, library reading promotions, projects that target specific readers and run our own research and publishing programme. Our initial staff base of two full-time people has multiplied by 800 per cent! Our virtual office is now a physical one. We think we have achieved a lot in our five short years.
“It’s hard to believe The Reading Agency is already five – it seems to have been around for so much longer. It has huge ambition, enthusiasm and energy for reading and libraries. Happy birthday to The Reading Agency.” Tony Durcan, President, Society of Chief Librarians.
We are not stopping here though. Once we’ve eaten lots of birthday cake we are going to be pressing on with delivering the National Year of Reading 2008 with the National Literacy Trust on behalf of the Department for Children, Schools and Families. We’ve also got plans for strengthening our partnerships, exciting new work with children and young people and a brand new publications programme.
Without wishing to seem impatient – we are looking forward to celebrating our tenth birthday…