About Get Into Reading
‘Can’t you stay a bit longer? I want to find out what happens in the story.’
Looked-after child, Wirral Children’s Service
‘It’s been great this - a real boost. I loved this at school but I haven’t looked at a book in fifteen years. It makes me wish I hadn’t thrown those years away, because I’d forgotten what it feels like when you read something like this, the power of words I mean.’
Client at the Kevin White Detox Unit
‘I saw many people fight their demons by stepping onto that stage. It made some of us feel, for the first time, ‘Yes. I can do this’.’
Participant in Community Shakespeare, Wirral
Get Into Reading is our leading social outreach project. Since 2001, we have offered weekly reading groups for everyone: from those who wouldn’t usually pick up a book to keen readers. The groups aim to improve wellbeing, build community and extend reading pleasure, and target hard to reach people across Merseyside and elsewhere. In 2007 Get Into Reading was a finalist in the prestigious NHS Health and Social Care awards.
“It is one of the best things I have done. joining GIR. Because of having Asperger’s Syndrome it can be difficult to join in - like having jelly with fish. But I feel I have found my jelly and ice-cream here!”
GIR group member
Reading groups with a difference
Uniquely, short stories, novels and poetry are read aloud by trained facilitators, with members joining in, as they wish. Engagement with the text is immediate - and enriched by the spontaneous sharing of life stories and experiences of group members as confidence builds over time.
Where the reading groups happen
Get Into Reading groups meet weekly in venues such as community centres, hospitals, rehab centres, prisons, libraries, arts centres and schools, and have transformed the lives of many people - young and old alike.
‘Get Into Reading groups should be like pubs along the Docks Road, one on every corner.’
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, author and screenwriter
Why it works
Get Into Reading members are often socially isolated through physical or mental health problems. Through the reading of literature and the sharing of experiences with other people in the group, members often benefit from improved concentration and wellbeing, greater personal confidence, and feel a growing sense of community.
‘It helps you to forget yourself and opens up your eyes to what’s out there.’ GIR group member
Get Into Reading groups open members up to a language of emotions that they may otherwise find difficult to access.
“The Reader Organisation’s intervention is distinguished from other reading therapies in emphasising the importance of serious, ‘classic’ literature and its role in mediating experience and offering a model of human thinking and feeling.”
(Blake Morrison, Guardian, 5th January 2008)
Mersey Care NHS Trust Medical Director, Dr David Fearnley, runs his own weekly Get Into Reading Group at Ashworth Hospital:
“Shared reading is enjoyable and it also helps patients to get better - now that’s quite revolutionary! We need more of this taking place.”
Get Into Reading is a non-medical intervention, a social prescription, to aid emotional distress and can be delivered at any time and on any day. It promotes meaningful activity, has both short and long-term benefits, prompts authentic enagagement and provides positive cultural experience.
“Get Into Reading is exactly the kind of work we at the Department of Health want to develop over the next ten years.” Professor Louis Appleby, NHS Director for Mental Health
Developing the project
Get Into Reading currently works with Local Authorities and the NHS in Liverpool, Wirral, Salford and East Lancashire to develop the project. It’s going national: plans are underway to develop the project in Dundee, Essex and London; we’re also commissioned by the NHS Serious Personality Disorder department in Manchester to develop a project investigating the effect of shared literature on the emotional well-being/mental health of prisoners.
Supported by:
About The Reader Organisation
Durham Readers Together is part of The Reader Organisation pioneering
Get Into Reading project. A registered charity, it is dedicated to bringing a
Reading Revolution this means great books and poetry reaching everybody.
Why? Because reading matters to everyone.
Durham Readers Together started in April 2008 through the courtesy of Hallgarth Care Home, Hallgarth is part of Southern Cross Healthcare, a major company in UK healthcare.
Why It Works In Durham
Since the start of the Get Into Reading project, anecdotal evidence has been gathered on the benefits of these reading groups. Records are kept by staff who assist at readings which clearly show how people with physical or mental health problems benefit through the reading of literature or poetry and the sharing of experiences with other people in the group, members often benefit from improved concentration and wellbeing, greater personal confidence and feel a growing sense of community.
Click here for up to date news relating specifically to the Durham Readers Together group.
The Reader Organisation is a charity dedicated to bringing about a Reading Revolution - this means great books reaching everybody. It’s our mission to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in sharing a wealth of literature. Why? Because reading matters to everyone:
