The Ripple Foundation: Fostering a Love of Reading and Writing

It's a privilege to have a guest post today by Omoyeni Adeyemo, a Ripple Foundation volunteer. The Ripple Foundation fosters creativity, education, and imagination in youth across Canada. It's an organization well worth supporting.

I spent my childhood with my head buried in books. In elementary school, around age seven, I decided on a friendship with a girl in my class based on two events. The first was her introducing me to a Jacqueline Wilson book which spurred an unremitting love for Wilson’s books till my mid-teens. The second was that she let me in on the secret of using the library outside of library period. I also liked to write, though I never completed any of my stories because there was always something lacking. However, I never saw reading as a gateway to spurring my creativity and improving my writing.   

As I grew older, I started to read less because it seemed a quixotic past time in relation to school work or keeping up with the other responsibilities of a child. I also stopped writing much as a result. It was not until University that I reconnected with the necessity of holding on to both.

Presenting Ripple Foundation. Created by Ivy Wong and run fully by volunteers, Ripple Foundation’s goal is to educate our youth and foster creativity by encouraging them to read and write. The organization offers a creative writing challenge called Kids Write 4 Kids (KW4K) for students in grades 4 to 8 to support its cause. The competition is in its fourth year and accepting ongoing submissions till March 31st 2016. The winner(s) selected by the judges, get their book published in print and in digital forms and net proceeds from all the KW4K books go to the school of the winner(s) of the year. In addition, the winning authors have the opportunity to be part of the judging panel for the next contest, alongside teachers and people in the book publishing industry.


In the past three years, KW4K has accepted more than 500 entries and had 8 winners’ books published, the latest being Mika’s Fortune by Faith Emiry and Escape From The Taco Shop by Christopher Smolej. Because of the success of the contest, Ripple Foundation was registered as a non-profit organisation in August 2015. Prior to receiving not-for-profit status, the programs operated under Ripple Foundation were run by Ripple Digital Publishing, a Toronto based digital publishing company specializing in educational digital learning products for children. Ripple Foundation is primarily funded by donations from Ripple Digital Publishing and accepts donations-in-kind from supporters. All donations are poured back into the foundation’s programs and initiatives.

When I first learnt about Ripple Foundation, what came to mind were the opportunities it would have afforded me as a child.  Ripple Foundation would have enriched my childhood in a few ways: as a reminder that reading and writing go hand in hand, as an incentive to write, with the chance to be a potential author thereby fostering creativity. Also, reading other children’s published books would have given me proof of the prospect that I too could be an author. 

Even better is that Ripple’s focus is boosting creativity and educating youth in general, writing is simply a medium. Writing was chosen because it is less exclusive than, for example, music or art. Ripple might eventually have more contests and incentives to build other sorts of creative abilities, only time will tell. But for now, my childhood self is grateful that there is such an organization to nurture my reading habits and cultivate better writing practices.

Many thanks to the Ripple Foundation for the wonderful work it does to promote literacy, creativity, and imagination in children. Encourage the children in your life to enter the Kids Write 4 Kids challenge. 


Thank you, Omoyeni.