Read While You Wait Seeks Barbershop Partners in Avoyelles and Rapides

In an effort to link the African American male barbershop experience with positive early literacy exposure, Truly Thrive will be supplying strategically selected books, targeted for African American boys in grades K-5, to barbershops in Avoyelles and Rapides through its new Read While You Wait initiative. Through the initiative, boys will be able to read the books during their visits to a participating barbershop and after every ten books read, receive a free haircut.

Truly Thrive is currently accessing barbershops in Avoyelles and Rapides to become Read While You Wait locations. Each participating barbershop will receive fifteen curated titles (start-up book set), one colorful bookshelf, and a window decal. If you are a barbershop owner and interested in making your shop a Read While You Wait location, please fill out the form below and we will contact you shortly.

Welcome to Our New Website

Over the past year, as we have worked to implement our new strategy, we have found it necessary to change how — and how often — we communicate with all the people who are vital to our work: nonprofits, businesses, communities, educators, policymakers, and ordinary citizens.

That led us to create this website. It will provide ongoing updates about the three cross-cutting strategies we deploy in our work:

  • Strengthening Organizations, through financial support, technical assistance, and capacity building
  • Leading Collaboration, by bringing together and connecting the most respected advocates to help build an unbreakable safety net
  • Influencing Systems, by using data to inform policies and decision making, and support solutions that work

Through this website, we also want to showcase our partners and the important work they are doing, and we want to share timely and relevant articles, reports, videos and other content from a variety of sources. These insights can inform and influence our collective work.

We will be posting fresh content weekly, so we hope you will make regular visits to see what’s new.