Richmond mom brings literacy to Laundromats

KALW: 7.28.2014 by Holly McDede

The Clean Xpress Laundromat is smack in the middle of Richmond’s busy MacDonald Shopping Center. Moms are loading and unloading machines. So you might imagine their kids are sitting in plastic chairs watching television. But they’re not. They’re reading.

“Bookstore. Bookstore cat. This is Muligan. Muligan is a working cat. He works in a bookstore,” says Kahlil Moneiro, who is reading Space Rock with his mom, Tana Moneiro.

Tana Monteiro is a working mom and an organizer for the Richmond College Prep School. Of course, she wants her son to read. But she finds actually getting him to Richmond’s Main Library to be practically impossible. It’s only open five days a week. It closes its doors, most days, at 5 pm. What Monteiro does have time for, though, is doing laundry. She has to.

So there she was at the Clean Xpress Laundromat one day. She saw how bored her son was, and that’s when something clicked. Why not bring the library to the laundromat?

First, she needed some books. So, she enlisted help from The Richmond Community Foundation and West County Reads. Then, it was time to go to the owner of the laundromat with her vision.  READ MORE !