Since 2009, the Festival has raised more than £120,000 for reading and community charities, including St Michael & All Angels Church which runs the Festival and is itself a charity. It donates all profit after costs to its charity partners and actively promotes their activities and need for volunteers throughout the year. Each year, it supports three nominated charities alongside the church.
After a six-month review in 2021/2022 that generated a dozen suggestions from local people, the Chiswick Book Festival decided to support three new charities. One is benefitting from the 2022 Festival and two more are scheduled for support from 2023.
At the 2022 Festival, two of its current charities will benefit financially for the last time – Doorstep Library, which runs home reading projects for disadvantaged children in Hammersmith and Fulham, and InterAct Stroke Support, which employs actors to read to stroke patients in West London hospitals.
The new charity in 2022 is Read for Good, which helps children to read for pleasure through programmes in schools and hospitals. It will use funds raised through the Chiswick Book Festival to provide books and storyteller visits for seriously ill children in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and it will promote the partnership through its links with many local schools. It replaces The Felix Project, which redistributes surplus food to charities and schools.
The relationship bore fruit in National Storytelling Week, as Read for Good announced on Facebook:
For #NationalStorytellingWeek, Read for Good teamed up with storytelling friends InterAct Stroke Support, who provide reading services for stroke survivors. 
Introduced at Chiswick Book Festival, we found a lot of common ground in the therapeutic power of books and stories. 
To celebrate the week, Read for Good appeared on InterAct’s podcast, ‘Right Side of The Brain’, discussing our vital work with children: https://www.interactstrokesupport.org/rightsideofthebrain
Our other charity Doorstep Library featured one of our most loyal CBF supporters as one of its Volunteers: “Happy #NationalStorytellingWeek! To celebrate, we will be sharing stories from some of our volunteers and families all week! To start us off, we will be sharing our volunteer Brian’s story. Read Brian’s story here – https://bit.ly/Brians_Story_DL . Brian began: “My wife and I first became aware of Doorstep Library through the Chiswick Book Festival …”
In 2023, alongside Read for Good and St Michael & All Angels Church, the Festival intends to support:
Koestler Arts, the leading prison arts charity, which is based in W12 and promotes writing, reading and literacy in the criminal justice system, and
Read Easy Ealing, a new charity set up in 2021, which provides one-to-one reading tuition for local adults who want to learn to read or improve their reading skills. Their selection is subject to due diligence checks by the Charities Group at St Michael & All Angels Church.
The Chiswick Book Festival also raises funds for St Michael & All Angels Church, Bedford Park, which hosts, runs and underwrites the Festival. St Michael’s sees the arts as a central part of its mission; and of its worship, through music, paintings and poetry; and of its community outreach, through the Chiswick Book Festival and Bedford Park Festival, which it also runs. Charity number: 1133805.
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At the end of January 2020, the Chiswick Book Festival and Cookbook Festival presented cheques of £5,000 each to their three charities and to St Michael & All Angels, which hosted the 2019 Festivals. See reports on ChiswickW4.com and the Chiswick Herald. Read more.
Photo above: Left to right: Torin Douglas, Chiswick Book Festival; Jo Pratt, Cookbook Festival; Nirjay Mahindru, InterAct Stroke Support; Isabella White, The Felix Project; Fr Kevin Morris, St Michael & All Angels; Annabel James, Doorstep Library, Jules Kane, Cookbook Festival. January 27th 2020. (The Cookbook Festival has changed its name to The Cookbook Kitchen and now runs events throughout the year. You can sign up for its newsletter on its website).
Our previous charities
For ten years, the Chiswick Book Festival supported RNIB Talking Books Service and Books for Children, supporting blind and partially-sighted people. During that time, the Festival sponsored many Talking Books: by previous CBF speakers such as Claire Tomalin and Andy McNab; Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford, set partly in Chiswick; Mary Berry’s Absolute Favourites, Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, and Keeping On, Keeping On by Alan Bennett. Our final Talking Book was Gainsborough: A Portrait by James Hamilton, which highlights the artist’s close association with Chiswick’s William Hogarth.
The Festival has also supported The Letterbox Club, which works with local authorities to send book parcels to children in care and adopted children, and Room to Read, which promotes literacy in parts of Africa and Asia.