Our Reading Revolution is making it possible for people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to enjoy and engage with reading, build community and improving individual wellbeing.

our vision

We envisage a world in which everyone has access to literature, and in which personal responses to books are freely shared in reading communities in every area of life.

our mission

Our mission is to build a reading revolution.

This means we work to promote reading literature as a vital life skill, to give everyone the confidence and ability to find pleasure in reading, to bring attention to the power of reading in contributing to personal and social wellbeing, and to build reading communities in which shared meanings can be constructed across social and cultural boundaries.

how the reading revolution began

The Reader Organisation began life as The Reader magazine, set up in 1997 by Jane Davis and her colleagues from Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool, Sarah Coley and Angela Macmillan. The Reader, still in publication today, was designed to spread the word about what had started in those classes – shared reading. It was here that Jane began to develop the read-aloud and personal response model that is at the heart of our Get Into Reading project.

Seeing scope beyond the university, Jane set out to bring great writers – from George Eliot, Shakespeare, and Chekhov to Frank Cottrell Boyce, Mitch Albom and Doris Lessing – to those who would not otherwise have the opportunity read them and may be, in other ways, finding it difficult to engage socially.

The first Get Into Reading group was set up in 2002, in a small library in Birkenhead, Wirral, for a group of young single mums. This five-week pilot was so successful that it led to the development of a continuous, and growing Get Into Reading project, which now sees Get Into Reading groups running not only across the whole of Merseyside but out to Wigan, Manchester, London, Belfast, Durham… and now in Europe and Australia.