About Us

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Amplifying Voices for Youth was founded with the mission of getting own-voices books into the hands of colonially marginalized youth. We are working with teachers, schools, library specialists, and youth programs to bring increased and more accurate representation to BIPOC, disabled, and LGBTQIA2S+ youth. We are working to support the work of educators and youth leaders around the world and make it a little easier for them to access inclusive materials. We also have platforms for our grant recipients to connect with each other about how they’ve used their books, what made them choose these titles, any challenges they face in their classrooms or programs, what the students thought about their texts, and other ways they might like to connect with each other. We also have a program to bring the authors of the books we donate to the classrooms where they’re being read via Zoom and other digital platforms so the students can have direct access to authors whose experiences and perspectives more closely resemble theirs. This is a way of deepening meaningful representation and creating connections between colonially marginalized students and the authors who are telling their own stories.

We were founded by Marianna Como in 2020. We are a 501c3 nonprofit.