Summer with the Library promotes literacy, year-round reading, informal learning, and community engagement for children, teens, and adults. The Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) designs Summer with the Library to cultivate the joy of reading. Librarians encourage participants to choose their reading material, select activities that interest them, and work towards completing their reading and activity goals. With most of the 73 library branches located in low-income neighborhoods, LAPL delivers literacy-focused educational activities to communities that need it most.

Summer with the Library offers free educational programming, author and illustrator talks, and performances to inspire learning, community, imagination, and creativity. Librarians giveaway thousands of free books to youth who sign up for the Summer Reading Challenge. The initiative promotes LAPL’s vast free resources for people of all ages and abilities.

LAPL partners with schools, parks, daycare centers, and many other community organizations to extend the reach of Summer with the Library beyond libraries and into Los Angeles’s diverse communities.

For information about the Your Author Series, which connects children and teens to children and young adult authors and illustrators, visit lapl.org/your-author.

 

Summer with the Library is generously supported the following donors: 

  • Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation (Lead Sponsor) 
  • Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund 
  • Estate of Victoria Erteszek Foote  
  • The Council of the Library Foundation 
  • Maxwell H. and Muriel S. Gluck Endowment 
  • California State Library 
  • Walter and Holly Thomson Foundation, Bank of America, N.A., Co-Trustee 
  • Flora L. Thornton Endowment 
  • Mattel, Inc. 
  • The Albert Parvin Foundation