Photograph shows teams from our current charities at the 2023 Chiswick Book Festival (l-r): Beth Aydon, Tilly Buckroyd (Koestler Arts); Jane Denton, Helen West (Read for Good); Catherine Jaquiss, Jenny O’Neill (Read Easy Ealing)
After the 2023 Festival, we donated £5,000 to each of our reading charities, and to St Michael & All Angels Church, which hosts and administers the Chiswick Book Festival. See news story. There was a ‘big cheque’ presentation on March 26th 2024 with principals of the charities and volunteers, photographed below with Torin Douglas, the Festival director.
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Since 2009, the Festival has raised more than £140,000 for reading and community charities, including St Michael & All Angels Church which runs the Festival and is itself a charity. We donate all profit after costs to our charity partners and actively promote their activities and need for volunteers, throughout the year. Each year, we support three nominated charities alongside the church.
The Festival’s current reading charities are :
Read for Good, which helps children to read for pleasure through programmes in schools and hospitals. It uses funds raised through the Chiswick Book Festival to provide books and storyteller visits for seriously ill children in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and promotes the partnership through its links with many local schools.
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.
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, including the Chiswick Book Festival and the Bedford Park Festival, which it also runs. Charity number: 1133805.
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Our previous charities
At the end of February 2023, the Chiswick Book Festival presented cheques totalling £11,000 to its three 2022 charities – Read For Good, Doorstep Library and InterAct Stroke Support – and to St Michael & All Angels. Read more.
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 several 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.