Access to a book can begin a much larger journey.

I was four years old when I asked my mother why some children had books at home and others had none. It was a child’s question. I have spent the ten years since trying to answer it properly.

I had no plan. What I had was the feeling a book gives you when you love it, and the sense that it was wrong for that to be something only some children got to have. So I started knocking on our neighbours’ doors and asking for the books they had finished reading.

Everything since has grown out of that one question. Collecting led to distributing, distributing led to libraries, libraries led to the reading sessions that fill them. I am still doing this because I still love it — and because futures literacy, the part I care most about now, asks children to do exactly what I was doing at four: notice something about the world, and wonder whether it has to stay that way.