After her three-year-old daughter experienced an act of racism from a peer at daycare, Ky Newsome, director of advocacy services at Sexual Assault Counseling & Information Service in Charleston, Illinois, and Kate Shanks, sophomore in Education, began looking for local programs that collected resources for diversity education. They didn’t find any, so they decided to start their own.
Newsome and Shanks met when Shanks was a senior in high school, interning at an advocacy center for victims of domestic violence where Newsome was serving as a mentor. They founded The Kadie Project in 2019. The project, named after Newsome’s now six-year-old daughter Kadence, collects multicultural resources, such as books, posters and puzzles to be donated to classrooms to promote cultural awareness and inclusion.
“The teacher that we’re helping this year and the teachers that we’ve helped in the past didn’t have a large classroom library that represented multiculturalism or interculturalism, and so we’ve gotten really good feedback as far as the benefit and to be able to have this type of program,” Newsome said.
The Kadie Project held its first donation drive in 2019, and has so far supplied two day care centers and three classrooms, including this year’s drive, which will benefit a fifth-grade classroom at Jefferson Elementary School in Charleston.
Shanks said the project’s mission is important to her as a future elementary education teacher and as a white woman joining a workforce that is already nearly 80% white.
“White teachers are responsible for making sure that their classrooms and their curriculum and their pedagogy are as accessible and as responsive to all their students as possible,” Shanks said.
Shanks and Newsome create donation wish lists on Amazon, and Shanks said they try to make sure every item was created by a member of the community it represents in order to have accurate and empowering representations of different cultures and to support the work of creators in marginalized communities.
They’ve also started using Bookshop.org, a cooperative of small-business bookstores where patrons can support Black, Indigenous and People of Color and LGBTQ-owned bookstores.
Newsome said they’ve exceeded their donation goals every year, even during the pandemic.
“We have people who donate to us that do not live in Coles County or have any type of connections to our school district, and so it really does something for myself to see that support,” Newsome said.
In their first year, when they were able to go into day care centers to deliver the materials, Shanks said the kids were very curious and excited to learn.
“It just reaffirms to us how much this hatred and intolerance, it is learned,” Shanks said. “Kids are thrilled to learn about other people.”
Newsome said the accuracy of representations of people from different cultures is crucial.
“It also provides these safe spaces for children who might be a part of those cultures where they can see themselves represented in the resources in their classrooms in a positive and accurate way,” Newsome said.
In the future, Newsome said she wants The Kadie Project to expand to other counties and school districts and collect resources throughout the year instead of during a six-week period.
The current drive is running through March 31, but people interested in donating can still reach out to The Kadie Project through its Facebook page or email to set up pickups or donate funds directly through PayPal, Cash App and Venmo at thekadieproject.

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