Belgium

Flemish Branch – IBBY Flanders

The Flemish Branch of  IBBY-Belgium is affiliated with Iedereen Leest (Everybody Reads), located in Antwerp.

Iedereen Leest is a non-profit organisation that mainly focuses on making reading accessible for all. Reading is important in personal development and helps people to actively participate in the world around them, preventing social exclusion. Iedereen Leest highlights the crucial role of reading for pleasure in the literacy discourse: it is the key to an inspiring reading climate and a diverse reading culture. 'More reading for pleasure, more readers': that is our mission.

Iedereen Leest coordinates campaigns to make reading more visible and develops programmes for libraries, schools, child-care centres and other organisations to share methods and ideas to enhance reading engagement.

Examples of our yearly campaigns and programs are:

• Children’s Book Month highlights the importance of reading for pleasure, reading aloud and looking at illustrations, with a qualitative offer.
• Reading Aloud Week in November highlights the importance of reading aloud.
• Children’s Jury, the largest young reader jury in Flanders, for children and young adults between the ages of 4 and 18 years.
• Bookstart stimulates young parents to enjoy reading (aloud) books with their babies and toddlers, in collaboration with child-care centres, libraries and other local partners.

Furthermore, Iedereen Leest collaborates with universities and universities of applied sciences on research projects, highlights relevant research proposals, and assists students with their research. The broad informative offer that Iedereen Leest develops – including educational manuals and inspiration guides, as well as physical study days and online learning processes – is always based on scientific and practical insights.

Iedereen Leest’s specialist library is home to an extensive collection of children’s and young adult books in Dutch as well as a multilingual collection of professional literature on children’s and young adult literature, reading promotion and library activities aimed at children, as studied by different disciplines.

Our dedication exceeds the possibilities of Iedereen Leest so we have joined hands with people in schools, libraries, day-care centres, academia, the book profession, and the media. With them, we develop ideas and projects.

To widen our scope and to keep track of trends we exchange ideas and expertise with our international partners and occasionally adapt some of their successful projects to the Flemish context. Iedereen Leest is a member of several international networks, of which IBBY is one.