December 11, 2018

A message to all our friends and supporters, from founder William Rubel

Firstly, our deeply felt thanks to all of you who sent us donations during the course of this year. Each of your gifts has provided us with a real morale boost as well as supporting our work.

2018 was a fantastically busy and productive year for us at Stone Soup. The headline news is that we got Stone Soup back in print at the end of September. We followed up the redesign of Stone Soup by our fabulous London-based designer, Joe Ewart, with the revision and redesign of each of our 8 anthologies (the Stone Soup Books of…). Now better than ever, they were the star of our booth at last month’s California Library Association conference. We developed two partnership agreements this year, one with the education site Miacademy, and another with the Chicago-based publisher MacKenzie Press. We are providing Miacademy with content from Stone Soup and collaborating on a writing contest with MacKenzie Press. We signed a distribution agreement with a book agent based in Japan to sell the foreign language rights to our publications in Asia.

With the donations you gave us this year we just hired a teacher to write a curriculum document that shows how Stone Soup is aligned to the United States’ common core curriculum. This is a very important project for us as we look forward in 2019 to expand Stone Soup further into primary and middle school classrooms. Thank you.

We are now thinking of Stone Soup as a bridge. At its core, Stone Soup encourages young readers to become young writers. It is a bridge between consuming literature and art and being a creator of literature and art.

Writing and making art requires us to integrate our thoughts, experiences, feelings, and observations of the world.  When you support Stone Soup you support a project that has proven itself effective at empowering young readers to make the leap from being readers and appreciators of artworks to also being writers and artists themselves. Turning kids into writers and artists changes lives.

Like many cultural organizations, we need some help financing some of our basic day-to-day needs and more especially, we need help with special projects. Your donation will help us redesign the website in 2019, bringing it up to the design level of our magazine and books, and to make the website easier to navigate—all very important as we further develop Stone Soup for classroom use on Chromebooks and iPads. Your donation will help us publish more anthologies. There are still many hundreds of stories and poems in the Stone Soup archive going back to 1973 that deserve to come back into print, joining the ever-growing body of great work we are publishing now.

In 2019 we are embarking on a project to give a voice to children who are enmeshed in war. There is going to be a special issue of Stone Soup devoted to this project. The special issue will feature writing, art, and photographs by children fleeing wars and civil unrest. Additionally, we will create a platform on the Stone Soup website to provide a place for these children to speak with each other—and to us—through their creative work.  More details will follow in the first quarter of next year.

Stone soup (the soup) is something that is created by lots of people adding their own ingredient. That is what the original Stone Soup story is about–creating something out of nothing. Each of the young people who send us work to be published in our magazine or on our website collectively create this incredible body of literature by kids. The totality of material published by Stone Soup is a testament to the creative and intellectual power of young people. Your donations, no matter how small, add up.

When you give to us you join us as a peer helping make this world a better place.

Thank you, sincerely, for your support

Reasons to join the Stone Soup Supporters’ Community

Stone Soup publishes the best writing and art by children age 13 and under. For 45 years it has helped to inspire young creators to produce their very best work, and rewarded them by publishing it in a high quality literary magazine (and now on our website, too). Countless children, and their parents, teachers, grandparents, librarians, counsellors and class leaders have told us that our approach to children’s creativity – to encourage it, respect it,  develop it, show it to the world, and take it seriously – has transformed lives.

One-off and regular donations

Each of our Supporter levels is named for a well-known author or artist who, like our Stone Soup contributors, did remarkable work as a child before going on to adult greatness. Please consider giving a gift at one of these levels, either as a one-off donation, or a little every month. Or, if you prefer, choose a different amount. Every gift is welcome! You will join the list of supporters published each year in the Stone Soup Annual at the level of your total donations over the year.

Daisy Ashford              $  25.00, or $2.00 monthly
Margaret Atwood        $  50.00, or $4.00 monthly
Charlotte Brontë         $  100.00, or $8.00 monthly
Albrecht Dürer            $ 250.00, 0r $20.00 monthly
Edith Wharton            $ 500.00, 0r $40.00 monthly
Jane Austen                 $ 1,000.00+

Thank you for becoming a part of  the Children’s Art Foundation Supporters’ community.

Why donate to Stone Soup?

Stone Soup has always had a clear sense of purpose. The Children’s Art Foundation, our parent, is a a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with an explicit focus on the literary and creative education of children. While much of our work is supported by subscription revenue (and sales of art prints, anthologies and the Annual in our online store), we rely on wider fundraising to fulfil our mission. We want to continue to develop Stone Soup for today’s young creative artists and thinkers, for others their age who are inspired and motivated by seeing their peers being published, and for future generations. Your donations are what makes our work to encourage and improve the creative education of our children possible. Please support us.

Donate

Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc. is a 501(c)(3) educational charity registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498. All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. No good or services were provided in exchange for your contribution.