Preschool teacher Maria Alejandra Jaimes reached the peak of her frustration late one afternoon in January 2007 while sitting alone in her classroom at the rural pre-school in La Fría, a town nestled in the foothills of Venezuela’s Andes Mountains. She had no books to read to her restless little students, which meant that they would be slow to acquire the basic pre-literacy skills needed to become good readers. Worse, nobody at home could read aloud to them – their families could not afford books.

Maria Alejandra decided to enlist parents, teachers and even family members in a search for books, and she learned of FUNDVEC’s mission. After informing FUNDVEC of her children’s plight, she forged an alliance with FUNDVEC and with a special grant built and installed a special new “bookcase library” in the preschool in March 2007. As part of a special agreement, parents would also volunteer to come to the preschool to read to the children.

The children loved being read to from their new books, and the bookcase library was such a success that it became the pilot for FUNDVEC’s Planting Seeds of Knowledge Bookcase Libraries Project.