Grassroots

The Queen’s Reading Room’s grassroots initiatives bring the transformative power of reading to people facing life’s greatest challenges. Through partnerships with St Mungo’s, The Elm Foundation, and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, we have donated over 2,300 books and established sustainable shared reading programmes that provide comfort, connection, and hope to people experiencing homelessness, domestic abuse survivors, and hospital patients. These projects demonstrate our commitment to ensuring everyone can access the profound benefits of reading: reduced stress, increased empathy, improved wellbeing, regardless of circumstance. This is work with real impact, changing lives one book at a time.

The Queen’s Reading Room believes profoundly in the transformative power of reading for everyone, regardless of circumstance. Our grassroots initiatives bring books, comfort, and connection to people facing some of life’s greatest challenges, ensuring the proven benefits of reading reach those who need them most: reduced stress, enhanced empathy, improved wellbeing, and the opening of doors to new worlds.

In 2024, we partnered with Opportunity Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to donate more than 1,400 books as part of their Kensington Christmas initiative, bringing stories and solace to patients during their recovery journeys.

Our collaboration with St Mungo’s has established a sustainable framework for support across their services. We have delivered a comprehensive shared reading project designed to foster and sustain shared reading groups across multiple St Mungo’s services, supported by Reading for Wellbeing and Opening the Book. Alongside providing books and carefully curated reading resources, we have facilitated the development of an accessible digital toolkit for Duty Managers, empowering them to become reading ambassadors within their services.

Developed by Opening the Book, this toolkit ensures that conversations around books and reading are accessible, person-focussed, and welcoming, giving staff confidence when discussing literature and stories whilst providing practical guidance to establish reading groups that encourage participants to open up and connect. We are deeply grateful to Lucy Hale at Pan Macmillan and Juliet Mabey of Oneworld Publications for their generous book donations to St Mungo’s, and to The Royal Warrant Holders Association for their Exceptional Major Grant, which funded the production of the digital toolkit. We also extend our thanks to Woodpecker Joinery, who crafted bespoke cedar bookshelves for the St Mungo’s services using offcuts from commercial orders, demonstrating their commitment to sustainability whilst supporting our mission.

Our partnership with The Elm Foundation brings therapeutic reading experiences to survivors of domestic abuse in Derbyshire. Through thoughtfully curated book selections, group reading sessions, and a bespoke toolkit commissioned from Opening the Book, we are empowering volunteers to use literature as a tool for communication and healing. Her Majesty Queen Camilla joined an intimate session with survivors and volunteers at our Chatsworth Festival, hearing first-hand how literature supports recovery and resilience.

Through these partnerships, we intend to light little fires and encourage access to enable everybody, everywhere, to make room for reading. These projects demonstrate how literature serves as a vital instrument in recovery journeys, offering comfort, escape, understanding, and hope. This is our mission brought to life: ensuring everyone can experience the transformative power of reading, because we believe reading makes life better.

St Mungo’s has been on the frontline of homelessness for 55 years, helping people to move forward with their lives. Their frontline teams are out on the streets, every day and night, looking for the people who urgently need our help.

Rough sleeping can be incredibly dangerous, with the threat of illness, exploitation, violence, and abuse ever present. Homelessness can happen to anyone, with more and more people being pushed onto the streets.

The Elm Foundation are a specialist Safelives Accredited Charity based in Derbyshire. They adopt a needs-led, trauma-informed approach and their work is based on prevention, crisis and recovery.

Their mission is to influence, develop and provide specialist support services for adults, children, young people and families at risk of, or affected by, domestic abuse.