By the time you read this, LeVar Burton’s Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to develop his Reading Rainbow program will be over. At the time of writing, his campaign has raised over USD 4.7m; that’s a whole lot more than the original USD 1m they were asking for. To date, it has become the most backed Kickstarter campaign ever with over 95,000 backers. If it reaches USD 5m, then Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, has also pledged to donate USD 1m.
In fact, to give you an idea how successful this campaign was, it hit the USD 1m mark on the first day of the campaign. Check out LeVar Burton’s emotional reaction that was thankfully caught on video:
Burton has been working hard to bring Reading Rainbow back ever since it went off air in 2006. He launched a tablet app in 2012 and has been working to expand this program. It melts my ice-cold heart to see someone so dedicated to teaching and encouraging children to read. According to his Kickstarter campaign, one out of four children in the United States will grow up illiterate. That’s 25% of your population. So it really is heartwarming to see that Burton and all the backers to this campaign are making an effort in whatever way they can to educate, encourage and inspire children all over the United States.
With the success of this campaign, it will enable the Reading Rainbow program to be provided to classrooms for free and be available as an app on all platforms.
In other related good news, just when we thought we had seen the end of Community we learn that the students of Greendate will return for a sixth season – on Yahoo Screen! Whether or not we’ll know what happens to Troy and LeVar Burton remains to be seen. Show creator Dan Harmon has indicated he will try to get Donald Glover to return for the sixth season. “I’m just going to go home, kill a chicken, drink its blood, make a Blair Witch thing out of its bones, pray to every deity that I have to that if we do get a sixth season that Donald will have tired of his Donald-ness.” Yeah, we hope he get’s tired of his Donald-ness too. We all miss Troy!
Expect awesomeness in 13 episodes to come this fall.
