The Bookmark Project founded in 2017 is a charity auction run by 1st Burley-in-Wharfedale Brownies from West Yorkshire in the UK. The Bookmark Project raises money for Katiyo Primary School in Zimbabwe- by auctioning online bookmarks doodled by authors, illustrators and celebrities. Since we started in 2017 we have raised £54,000 which has bought an English language reading scheme, built blocks of toilets, helped to safeguard the local water supply, purchased exam supplies and is currently building two brand new nursery classrooms for children who currently have no where for their lessons (other than outside or the local church.)
1st Burley Brownies are raising money to improve the education and therefore life chances of the children who attend Katiyo Primary School in Zimbabwe through funding a variety of projects – recently we have paid for new toilet blocks to be built, helped with providing clean water on site and we are in the process of starting to build a brand new nursery classroom block which will provide classrooms for the two youngest classes at the school who currently have lessons outside or in the local church.
The Bookmark Project is now one of our most important fundraising initiatives. Started by our leader in 2017 the first Bookmark Project auction raised £974 for the school. We were extremely grateful for the support of Julia Donaldson, Nick Sharratt, Caroline Quentin, The Brownlee brothers, the cast of The Girls musical, M.G. Leonard, Mairi Hedderwick, Chris Naylor-Ballesteros and many more, all of whom designed bookmarks for the auction.
In 2018 we built on that success with the help of old friends and new including Brian May, the cast of Casualty, Patrick Stewart, Jo Brand and Sandi Toksvig raising a brilliant £3080.
In 2019 we welcomed the largest group so far of authors, illustrators and celebrities, we are particularly grateful for the huge amount of support we get each year from the Kid Lit community. We raised a fantastic £2900 in 2019.
2020 brought many challenges for everyone and we worried that the Bookmark Project wouldn’t succeed in the way it had previously but our list of supporters and bookmark creators grew and grew with the most bookmarks ever created and a fundraising total of over £6000 more than doubling our best previous result.
2021 was a record breaking year for us with over £11,000 raised for Katiyo Primary School, allowing us to add to the pot for the nursery classroom as well as paying to build blocks of toilets, purchase textbooks, exam supplies and the stands needed to hold the school water tanks.
The support we received in 2022 was phenomenal and we broke our previous record raising over £14,000. We have been able to agree the budget for the first phase of building the nursery classrooms and we hope that building work will start early in 2023.
We are happy to say that the Bookmark Project will be back for 2024!
We are reaching out to you as an author, illustrator actor, sports person or other celebrity or maybe you are just a book lover. We would like you to design us a bookmark which we can auction to raise money for the school. Your design can be as simple or complicated as you like, it can be any shape you like. We would just like it to represent you and your love of books and learning or maybe the characters you write about if you are an author or a favourite quote from your favourite book. If you could sign your bookmark somewhere that would be amazing!
Please let us know if you need us to send you a blank bookmark to work on…
You can then send your finished bookmark to: The Bookmark Project, 1st Burley-in-Wharfedale Brownies, The Scout and Guide HQ, Peel Place, Burley-in-Wharfedale, Ilkley LS29 7JS
We will be auctioning all your bookmarks in May and we will keep you informed of how much we raise. Many thanks for reading this far! If you have any questions you can reach us through the Contact Us page or via twitter on @slhattersley or @1stburleybrownies .
Building work on our nursery classrooms is underway at Katiyo Primary School in Zimbabwe. A local team of builders began work on building our block of two nursery classrooms at the end of July/start of August. The site first needed to be leveled which was more challenging than expected and the first team gave up…
Just before Christmas we received a message from Katiyo Primary School in Zimbabwe where they explained that they were walking 3 km to fetch clean water as the school borehole had run dry. They never ask for anything but we knew that we had money in our Katiyo account and we knew we had to…
