Founding BookReach Volunteer Retiring After 25 Years

25 years ago, a group of local community members imagined a way to bring storytimes to the youngest populations in home-daycares across Lewiston, Auburn, and Minot. The initiative was named BookReach and it has been a beloved community and library partnership since 1998, currently sponsored through the Lewiston and Auburn Public Libraries. Mac McPeake, or Mr. Mac as he is affectionately known, is one of the founding BookReach volunteers. With his 2024 retirement announcement he reflects on his time volunteering for BookReach and how the beloved program began:

“In 1997, I was a member of the Lewiston Twin City Aspiration Partnership, a group of local businesspeople, educators, and other citizens who were seeking ways to improve our community. I volunteered to chair one of the Aspiration committees, and we chose as our goal childhood literacy. A member of our committee pointed out that teachers said they could tell within the first weeks of entering school whether a child had been read to. Also, those children who had been exposed to reading had a much easier time learning and were more successful in school.” – Mac McPeake

The BookReach goals would be:

• Bring a regular reading program and the best in children’s literature to toddlers and preschoolers in family child-care homes.
• To foster children’s enthusiasm for books so they will be ready to learn when they reach school.
• To increase familiarity of area families and child-care providers with a great variety of quality children’s resources.

Mr. Mac and the committee worked with the Lewiston and Auburn Public Libraries to arrange access to children’s books, local child-care providers to agree to have readers come into their locations, LL Bean to provide tote bags, and solicited volunteers willing to read. In 1998 BookReach became a reality.

“I am extremely proud of the committee’s work, and I have been a volunteer reader for BookReach since its inception. BookReach has given me a great deal of joy in the past 25 years. I have met and worked with some wonderful child-care providers, hundreds and hundreds of children, gracious library staff, and BookReach staff.

It’s important to read to the children in our community because it opens a big, new world for them. A child who is read to is more likely to be successful in school causing them to like school, therefore improving their chances of becoming responsible citizens who pass on their love of reading to their children and further improving our communities.

I can’t express the pleasure I experience when I’m out and a parent asks, “Are you Mr. Mac?”, and then goes on to say how much their son or daughter enjoyed my reading to them. It doesn’t get any better than that!

Sadly, due to health problems, I feel I am no longer able to give 100% to the program and it deserves 100%.”

– Mac McPeake

The Auburn and Lewiston public libraries will forever be grateful for the impact Mac McPeake has had on our community through his dedicated early-literacy work. The BookReach program still reaches small, in-home childcare locations along with larger preschool facilities like Promise Early Education. Roughly 300 children under the age of five are read to through BookReach each month. Both libraries are actively recruiting new child-care providers, preschools, and local volunteers to get involved so that BookReach can continue in the years to come.

The Lewiston Public Library is located downtown at 200 Lisbon Street at the corner of Pine Street. More information on BookReach is available by contacting BookReach Coordinator, Sadie Bonang, at 513-3004 ext. 3515 or sbonang@lewistonmaine.gov.