Conversation with Re-Imagining Bookstores

Join us for a session talking to Praveen Madan, Peggy Holman, and Amanda Hall about the Re-Imagining Bookstores movement, and hear how it is advocating for bookstore support in the US.

The PowerPoint presentation from the event can be viewed here: Reimagining Bookstores.

Imagine bookstores with new ways to engage their communities, easy access to funding and new business models. Now imagine these bookstores having strategies to increase readership, attract and retain high-caliber staff, and provide meaningful careers paying meaningful wages. Through these bookstores our communities deepen literacy, increase civic engagement, and become stronger.

If you can imagine this scenario, then it is time to embrace bookstores as a social cause. It is time to invest in bookstores so they have the means to strengthen and reinvent themselves. We seek to launch a movement to encourage a new wave of investments in bookstores similar to the investments that have historically been made in public libraries, museums, public radio and television, and non-profit journalism and literacy organizations. [Re-Imagining Bookstores]

Praveen Madan is obsessed with a strong and exciting future for bookstores. He has successfully led Kepler’s from the brink of closure to becoming one of the most innovative and thriving bookstores in the country. He has been informally advising bookstores and their community champions on new sustainable models.

Amanda Hall is an Emeritus Advisor of Kepler’s Books & Magazines in Menlo Park, CA.  A former small-business owner from Chicago, she has channeled her retail knowledge and passion for books into Kepler’s new mission-based model that supports community engagement, sustainability and staff welfare.  She has a BS in Journalism from Northwestern University and a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Illinois.

Peggy Holman supports diverse groups in facing complex issues by turning presentation into conversation and passivity into participation. In The Change Handbook, Holman & her co-authors profile 61 practices that engage people in creating their desired future. Her award-winning book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity provides a roadmap for tackling complex challenges through stories, principles, and practices.