Beyond Delivery

Developing literacy begins at birth. By age three, a child’s brain will be 85% of its adult size, and also, at age three, a child’s vocabulary can predict third-grade reading achievement. What is one of the best ways to ensure children are armed with the knowledge they need to succeed? Reading aloud to that child and giving them access to books.

It is essential to Baptist Health to do everything we can to help our tiniest patients grow up healthy and strong, including their brains. Our Baptist Health Beyond Delivery program, in partnership with the Arkansas Imagination Library (ARIL), will strive to provide every baby born at our Baptist Health Medical Centers in Little Rock and North Little Rock with free, age-appropriate books every month for one year! Currently, the age group with the lowest number of babies enrolled in the ARIL program are one-year-old and younger. Baptist Health has joined forces with ARIL to change that!

Baptist Health delivers more than 5,000 babies annually between our two medical centers in Little Rock and North Little Rock; approximately 40% of these babies are born to families on Medicaid. We seek philanthropic partners to help sustain and grow this impactful program so that one day we can offer these powerful, educational tools for free to every baby born in our medical centers throughout the state.

Join our partnership and help us provide free, age-appropriate books for one year to babies born at Baptist Health, and together, let’s increase childhood literacy rates in Arkansas!