Making Books Sing 2009 Benefit CelebrationSaturday January 31, 2009 6:30 to 9pmThe TimesCenter242 West 41st Street (at Eighth Avenue)
New York, NY 10036
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Making Books Sing 2009 Benefit Celebration sponsored by A & E Television Networks and The New York Times Company. The Benefit will include: Mexican hors d' oeuvres, Latin wines, Latin Jazz by the Carmen Staaf Trio and a silent auction with gifts from Disney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Colbert Report, Late Show with David Letterman, and vacations across the country. Festive Attire requested.
Making Books Sing 2009 Benefit Celebration also has an online auction:
http://www.cmarket.com/auction/AuctionHome.action?vhost=makingbookssing
For more information about the Benefit, visit:
www.makingbookssing.org/benefit
From the organization's website:
In 1996, Making Books Sing began as the family theatre and education program of the Tony Award-winning Vineyard Theatre .
The Vineyard's Founder and Executive Director, Barbara Zinn Krieger believed deeply that families and children across New York City should have access to theatre with high standards of artistry and content, hallmarks of this major Off-Broadway theatre.
Theatre shares the power to educate and entertain with literature, an art form that also transports us to exotic lands and reveals new insights through language. Therefore, she imagined that the combination of theatre and literature, both on stage and in the classroom, could ignite in children a heightened curiosity, even love, of both art forms.
The idea took off, growing from two school partners and a few hundred audience members in 1996 to education programs in ten schools and 5,000 audience members by 2000. Our productions, once mounted in a tiny 70-seat Manhattan theatre, were touring to professional venues in The Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.
In 2001, Making Books Sing became an independent nonprofit theatre.
Today, Making Books Sing is a $1,000,000 organization directed by its founders, Mrs. Krieger and Debra Sue Lorenzen. We now partner each year with up to 25 NYC public elementary schools, four homeless shelters for families, and cultural organizations around the city. Our educational programs reach more than 5,000 children and families each year, while our theatre audiences exceed 12,000 in a four-borough tour across New York.
What's next? In September 2008, Making Books Sing embarks on our third three-year Strategic Plan, which will guide our organizational growth through 2011.
The overarching goal of our Strategic Plan is to increase the scope and visibility of our work through national touring (starting with the Kennedy Center and Stanford Lively Arts), the development of new education programs and the creation of MBS chapters outside NYC. Combined with intensive fund raising and communications campaigns, these efforts will enable us to reach tens of thousands more families and students each year.