The Fondation Hachette pour la lecture announces the eight winning non-profits from its 2024 call for projects

In 2024, the Fondation Hachette pour la lecture is providing support for ambitious non-profits which broaden access to books, culture and education by funding eight new initiatives with grant amounts ranging from €10,000 to €78,000.

The call for projects garnered 177 applications from which the Fondation Hachette staff drew up a shortlist. An in-house committee of Group employees then reviewed the shortlisted initiatives, interviewed project leaders, and submitted the results to the Fondation’s executive committee.

The eight projects selected reflect the Fondation’s commitments to supporting the promotion of reading, writing and the French language to the broadest possible audience, with a special focus on young people and others whose situation has hampered access to reading. The Fondation has proven its commitment to high-need areas with a twofold approach that aims to both prevent and combat illiteracy.

The eight organisations supported in 2024 :

• L’Afev – Association de la Fondation Etudiante pour la Ville, to provide reading support for 600 children in Years 1 and 2 who may be struggling with both oral and written language skills. Volunteer university student mentors help them to build up these skills and develop a love of reading. 
• apiDV, which makes higher education accessible to students with visual disabilities by providing transcriptions and/or adaptations of complex books in a wide range of formats (digital, braille, audio, tactile images and more).
• ATIA, to create 40 nursery classroom libraries in Madagascar to help prepare the children to move up to primary school, and to organize reading workshops for struggling primary students who might be tempted to drop out.
• Droit à l’école, whose “l’École des Sans École” (“School for the Unschooled”) in Paris provides weekly French classes for unaccompanied exiled minors, aged 15 to 17, until they can be enrolled in a public high school.
• La Fondation Apprentis d’Auteuil, to create libraries in Mayotte and organize writing workshops at 10 sites, targeting young people whose access to books has been hampered.
• L’Ecole à l’Hôpital, which provides free, one-to-one, bedside classes for hospitalized children at 40 hospitals in the Paris region to continue their education and make the return to school easier.
• Mots & Merveilles, to fight illiteracy in the Hauts-de-France region by outfitting five new sites with the teaching materials needed to provide individual and group French classes, helping 150 adults to find joy in reading and writing.
• PLAY International, to roll out the “Courir Lire ApPrendre à Ecrire” (CLAPE) programme in Senegal, providing sport-based teaching kits and games to help struggling students in Years 1 through 4 learn curriculum basics.

The Fondation Hachette pour la lecture was launched in late 2021 under the aegis of the Fondation de France and works to promote reading, writing and the French language more generally to all audiences, including children, young people in the broadest sense of the term, and others who are not engaged in or kept from reading.
https://www.fondationhachette.com/

Hachette Livre is a subsidiary of Lagardère SA and the world’s third-largest mainstream publishing group (trade and educational). With revenue of €2,809 million in 2023, it is the market leader in France, number two in the UK, third in Spain and fourth in the US (in trade publishing). The Group comprises over 200 imprints which together publish around 15,000 new titles each year in a dozen languages (mainly French, English and Spanish). It covers all segments of the mainstream publishing market: general fiction, non-fiction, paperbacks, children’s and YA books, illustrated books, travel guides, textbooks, study guides and partworks.
https://www.hachette.com/