A modest warehouse in Opelika serves as a fortress against illiteracy.
Cathy Gafford, executive director of Jean Dean Reading is Fundamental, acts as its commander.
Gafford and her father started Jean Dean RIF in 1990 while he was serving as district governor of Kiwanis. It is named after Gafford's mother.
"Literacy is important to me, and it's important to my dad, but that's not why we started it," Gafford said.
She said she and her father were supportive of efforts to provide affordable lunches to poor students, but they didn't think that was enough.
"We can do all this stuff physically for them," Gafford recalled her father saying, "but we'll just have healthier criminals in 20 years."
So they started a Lee County branch of RIF. The organization delivers more than 75,000 books to more than 25,000 students in Alabama. The books are typically handed out to Head Start classes.
"Our first goal was to get books in their homes, period," Gafford said. "Of course, we didn't realize how many of them needed it."
Gafford also didn't realize how involved she would get in the organization. In the beginning she and her father planned to run the organization for a year and turn it over to someone else.
Twenty years later, she's still there.
"This is my volunteer activity that took over my life," Gafford said.
Gafford said she also didn't realize how giving books to children could impact entire families.
Children go home and ask their parents to read their books to them and, because of that, some of the parents start attending adult literacy classes.
"From a little thing, big things had come," Gafford said.
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