About Us

Festival to Go is an all-volunteer free outreach program of the Rochester Area Children's Writers & Illustrators group which puts on the annual Rochester Children's Book Festival in November. There is absolutely no cost to the school for participating, as the presenters all waive their usual school-visit fees.

We recognize that many of the students in city schools do not have the advantage of being able to attend that festival, and at the same time most RCSD schools do not have the funds for enrichment activities such as author visits. Meanwhile, we see that the reading scores of city school children are much lower than the scores of their peers in Monroe County and elsewhere in New York State. We also recognize that grades 1-6 are formative years where these children are trying to settle for themselves whether reading is something fun to do, or simply something adults inflict on them. We know we cannot solve all the problems faced by Rochester students, but we have tried to help by providing in-person author visits for over 20 years (and district-wide virtual visits during the pandemic). Also, during the pandemic years we were able to deliver Scholastic books to entire school populations as part of the UPS/Toys for Tots literacy drive.

Each autumn, Festival to Go volunteers visit two or three city schools and speak to students in grades 1-6. (Although our primary focus is on grades 1-6, we have included grades 7 and 8 when a school included that population, and will also try to accommodate grades pre-K and K if the school wants.) Our enthusiastic volunteers consist of published writers and illustrators, as well as those who are working at their craft but have not yet been published or whose books are unavailable. In interactive sessions, they share their enthusiasm for reading and writing by reading from their own work or someone else's, leading workshops (story, poetry, drawing), singing songs, having the children act out a story, talking about the writing or drawing process, and telling about doing research—and revisions—for their stories.

Festival to Go Classroom Activity

Each year we apply for grants and donations so that we can provide a book for each student at each school we will be visiting. These books are chosen by that classroom's presenter—one of the books read to the students or talked about during the session. Ever since we included distributing books to students as part of our program in 2019, we have been able to obtain enough funding to do this. If we are ever unable to secure enough money for this many books, we would still visit the classrooms and provide library copies.

We realize that our coming into the school is a disruption of regular activities (we hope a joyful and worthwhile disruption!), but we really feel that the excitement we generate for reading and writing will see lasting results. It is our belief that once a child has met the creator of a story and learned what went into the making of it, and once the author has autographed that book, personalizing it with the child's name - that all of this will make the book much more meaningful and likely to be read repeatedly and cherished. While we are in favor of any program that gets books into the hands of children, we feel that - because of the connection the students will get with our authors and illustrators - the students are much more likely to read the books we provide.

Festival to Go Classroom Visit

Friends and Foundation of the Rochester Public Library is our fiscal supporter and has helped both Festival to Go and the Rochester Children's Book Festival greatly.

The Rochester chapter of Altrusa International has helped Festival to Go from our first year - donating library copies of books, plus volunteering to help out the day of the school visit.