How HoodProf Received hundreds of Storybooks through an alumni association, a private school, and a private donor

Towards HoodProf inaugural event which was a well attended launch event for our flagship reading club hub, the Woke Soyinka Centre, we were looking for age appropriate storybooks for kids age 6-10 years as gifts to the kids in our bookclub. We reached out to a few individuals and organizations for donation of books but the response was underwhelming.

Our BOT is made up of people from diverse walks of life so we decided to leverage their networks to see how each trustee could help achieve our goals. It’s typically easier to get things done in our society based on “know who” rather than your “know how”. So from a salesman perspective members of our BOT started putting down names of potential storybooks donor whom we planned to reach out to.

A former boss that I worked for in my pre-varsity days came to mind for reasons not far fetched. As owner of a premium catering outfit in Lagos she undoubtedly know a lot of elites, some of whom either own elite private schools or sit on their boards. So Mrs KD indeed used her goodwill to get us a carton full of really nice storybooks from an elite school in Lekki. We are grateful for this and she promised to conneect us with more people in her network who could help in similar ways.

We were still way short of the quantities of story books we were looking for after this initial donation so we turned to some of our alumni networks. Ahmadu Bello University mass commission alumni, class of 1999/2000 has an active WhatsApp platform so our founder, who is a bonafide member, also reached out to them with visuals from some of our reading club activities. Many members checked us out on our website and generously commended what we’re doing. Eventually we got some good storybooks shipped in from Jos, having been paid for by Madam Panmun, from BooksforAfrica. This is indeed a great way of leveraging our networks and we are indeed grateful to members of MACOSA (Mass Comm Students Association) who came through for us in this regard.

Last year, 2024, we organised a spelling bee competition and we were looking for storybooks to gift all the children who participated. They were twenty in number. So in our usual practice we began the search for potential donors. We sought out new potential donors and we eventually got Ms Ronnie through one of our trustees Ms Tega Okeme.

The kids who have received these storybooks and other educational materials through our various events, programmes and activities, cut across multiple neighbourhoods in underserved communities within Alimosho Local Government Area, and we plan to extend this to underserved communities across Lagos State in the foreseeable future.