READING, Pa. \u2013 Andre Reed has spent years being recognized for what he accomplished on the football field.<\/p>\n
Tuesday, though, he wasn’t at the Olivet Boys & Girls Club on Clinton Street to talk about football. Instead, he was giving kids a place to read, learn, and dream big.<\/p>\n
“Reading is fundamental, reading is knowledge, reading is power,” Reed said.<\/p>\n
The Andre Reed Foundation unveiled a brand-new reading space at Olivet.<\/p>\n
The “Read with Reed Program” encourages kids like 9-year-old Hadin Moore to make reading part of their daily lives.<\/p>\n
“I want people to, like, read more to get more smarter and have a good life,” Moore said.<\/p>\n
Reed, an Allentown native, played at Kutztown University before an NFL career that eventually landed him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
Before all of that, Reed was much like the children at Olivet.<\/p>\n
“I was a [Boys & Girls Club] kid for 12 years, from age probably 6 or 7 to like 16 almost,” Reed said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now he’s using his platform to give back to kids in the community and the clubs he says helped him become the man he is today.<\/p>\n
“Andre was a little kid, too, and Andre needed help, and I found help,\u201d Reed said. \u201cAnd I found a person that believed in me, which helped me believe in myself a little bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reed says the goal is to help make reading feel less like an assignment, and more like something kids actually want to do.<\/p>\n
“If you can’t read, it’s a little harder for you out there,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the more you read, the more you’re able to lead our readers. You want your readers to become leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, it\u2019s not just about the words on the page.<\/p>\n
Reed says it’s also the confidence that comes with being able to read them.<\/p>\n
“And that’s what you want these kids to have. Confidence and realize they can be anything, do anything, be anything they want to be,” Reed said.\u2002\u2002\u2002<\/p>\n
For the kids walking into the Olivet Boys & Girls Club on Clinton Street, their new reading nook is a new place to sit, open a book and get lost in a story.<\/p>\n
The goal is for kids to read 30 minutes a day and 83 books a year \u2014 a nod to the number Reed wore during his NFL career.<\/p>\n
“It is a space to just really create some excitement around literacy. A cool space for kids to just learn and continue moving forward and developing in that area of literacy,” said Reading Olivet CEO Rick Perez.<\/p>\n
Perez\u00a0says having a dedicated space like this can help make reading feel less like an assignment and more like something kids actually want to do.<\/p>\n
“It’s vital because education never stops, and we have to find ways to make education cool,” Perez said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2013 Andre Reed has spent years being recognized for what he accomplished on the football field.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[8919,117755,8090,31335,734,2726,21933,117756,736,128,130,129,1506,3315],"class_list":["post-282012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-academics","tag-andre-reed","tag-books","tag-boys-and-girls-club","tag-children","tag-kids","tag-literacy","tag-read-with-reed","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-stories","tag-students"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}