Conversations with Nancy Devon

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nancy Devon

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
We started Giving Tree Books to help promote children’s literacy and provide books to children in under-resourced areas of West Michigan. Over 60% of children from these areas don’t have a single book at home, and we wanted to change that.

So, we decided the best way to do that was to start our own children’s book publishing organization. We write and publish our own line of high-quality books and provide them free to children with few to no books at home.

The first school we visited in December 2023 was in a low-income area of Grand Rapids. There, we read our first picture book, Tasha Goes To Puppy School, and then surprised every student with a copy to call their own. The children’s reactions were amazing. They were so excited and thankful.

After that, we visited 7 schools in March 2024 during National Reading Month, where we gave away over 1,200 books. In our first year, we gave over 2,000 books to children in need.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Our biggest challenge so far has been obtaining the funding needed to print more books, reach more schools, and develop new books.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
While we believe it’s important to provide books to children in need, it’s equally important to provide them with high-quality books with great stories they can learn from. We’re proud that our books are award-winning and have received such positive support from school teachers and librarians. They also fit well into teachers’ Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculums, so we are excited about getting our books into more schools.

What makes our organization unique is that we not only create, design, and publish our own books to give to children in need, but we are also able to visit these schools as authors and spend time with elementary students. Those visits are exciting for the children and help them know that they matter.

We love that for every book we sell, we can provide a book free to a child in need.

What are your plans for the future?
Our plans for the future center around how we can reach more schools. Our goal for this year is to give away over 2,000 books to children in schools and through local hospitals like Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital and U of M Health-West. The needs are so great. With support from the community, we can reach our goal and continue to grow and reach more children with our books.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://givingtreebooks.org
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/givingtreebooks.org