January 24, 2025, marked the launch of the inaugural National Day of Reading, a landmark event that mobilized over 1,000 fraternity members across the U.S. and internationally. In a single day, Kappas members read to more than 23,000 students across 1,285 classrooms and distributed over 2,400 books to schools and libraries. From Oklahoma City to Rochester, this event promoted early literacy and offered students a powerful demonstration of Black male leadership in educational spaces. National Day of Reading
Room to Read & Kappa Alpha Psi®
Kappa Alpha Psi, Fraternity®
Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.® is the second oldest existing collegiate historically Black Greek Letter Fraternity and the first intercollegiate Fraternity. The Fraternity has more than 260,000 initiated members with 721 undergraduate and alumni chapters in nearly every U.S. state, and international chapters in Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, the West Indies, the United Kingdom, Germany, Korea, Japan, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Through its worldwide prominence, Kappa Alpha Psi® has had both a local and global impact. Local chapters of Kappa Alpha Psi, Fraternity® regularly engage in community outreach activities, distributing meals and groceries to families facing food insecurity, providing scholarships to young people matriculating to college, serving as mentors to young men, participating in blood drives and hosting seminars for public health awareness — and so much more.
Room to Read is partnering with Kappa Alpha Psi® for the Hands-on-Books Program, the first domestic Room to Read project in the United States. Watch the TODAY Show’s segment with Jenna Bush Hager about this incredible partnership:
Hand-on-Books Program
Room to Read’s partnership with the Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity supports our literacy portfolio in the United States. Together, we are working toward a world free from illiteracy and gender inequality, where all children have room to read, learn and grow. Through their Hands-on-Books program, the Kappa brothers regularly visit schools in historically under-resourced communities across the nation to distribute Room to Read books and conduct read aloud sessions to promote a joy of reading.
There are more than 150,000 members in Kappa Alpha Psi in 12 Kappa Provinces nationwide. Each Province nominated three chapters to participate in the program that partners with a historically under-resourced primary school in their area.
Room to Read trains these undergraduate volunteers, and each month participating chapters introduce a Room to Read South Africa storybook title to the elementary school by reading the books aloud, conducting reading activities and donating 10 copies to the school's library. Developed by local South African authors and illustrators, the books have the power to foster global citizenship for children in the United States.
The program had a soft launch in Milwaukee on November 15, 2019, and officially launched January 2, 2020, in Las Vegas during the Annual National Founders' Day celebration with a national press conference.
Since then, the fraternity has donated books provided by Room to Read to elementary schools throughout the country and announced it is donating more than 32,000 new books to students in grades 2–4 to schools located within Kappa Alpha Psi's 12 regions in the United States.
