Virtual events planned for Indigenous Literacy Day; ILF records ‘huge increase’ in support

Indigenous Literacy Day, to be held on Wednesday 2 September, will this year feature three virtual events celebrating language and literacy and focussing on voices and footage from the communities the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) works with.

ILF’s Karen Williams told Books+Publishing the events would ‘explore the how and why of what we do and truly celebrate it’.

Williams said that while donations to ILF were ‘quite heavily impacted’ after the bushfires of 2019/20 and Covid-19 restrictions, the Foundation’s EOFY Appeal had had a dramatic impact, while engagement with the worldwide Black Lives Matter campaign had also resulted in ‘a huge increase in support including many single recurring donors’. She said that publishers had been supportive in providing the Foundation with great discounts for its Book Supply program, as well as with some initiatives, including Black Inc.’s announcement that it would donate to ILF $2 from every print copy of its 2018 anthology Growing up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by ILF lifetime ambassador Anita Heiss, sold in the month of July.

‘Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is at once a celebration of Aboriginal literary voices, both established and emerging, and a positive way people can educate themselves about and begin to address the systemic racism which the Black Lives Matter campaign has drawn attention to so powerfully,’ said Williams.

Melbourne book retailer Readings, which is closing its shopfronts for the next six weeks as metropolitan Melbourne returns to Stage 3 Covid-19  lockdown restrictions, also announced it will be matching Black Inc.’s donations so that a total of $4 will be donated to the ILF for every print copy of the anthology Readings sells.

While the Covid-19 crisis has meant ILF’s writing workshops will not take place in person in 2020, a new grant has meant its Community Literacy Projects program is able to continue through the crisis and will be working with Tiwi Islands communities Milikapiti and Pularumpi to publish three new books for children, two to be written in Tiwi with the third book in English, with key words in Tiwi.

For more information about ILF and Indigenous Literacy Day visit the website here.

Category: Local news