"Take, donate, read, give back": this is the motto that gives life to the already more than 45 reading booths spread throughout the country and promoted by the Altice Foundation, to which this new booth in São João da Madeira was added on Friday. Through partnerships with various organizations, the Altice Foundation ensures the adaptation of these icons of telecommunications urban furniture, where the public telephone gives way to books, thus providing a space for the dissemination of reading at the service of communities. For Ana Estelita, Director of the Altice Foundation, "this project to convert telephone booths into small libraries is part of a strategic pillar of the Altice Foundation, which is to promote access to education and knowledge for all.
Increasingly, the Foundation has been focusing its initiatives on innovative projects with the capacity to give people the tools to have more and more opportunities. Our ambition is to achieve impact and enable transformation". São João da Madeira's new micro-library is housed in an old telephone booth that has been refurbished and converted for educational and cultural purposes, thus becoming a point of interaction and cultural dynamization with São João da Madeira's readers. All you have to do is bring a book and take another, so that reading has a light and informal dynamic.
The conversion of old telephone boxes is inspired by a movement started in the small village of Westbury-sub-Mendip, in the south-west of England, where its residents sought to transform one of the classically red telephone boxes into the world's smallest libraries. In Portugal, this project was started by the Altice Foundation in 2013 and today has more than 45 booths spread from north to south and the islands.
This Altice Portugal initiative materializes a space for democratizing access to education and culture, with the aim of strengthening community ties, exercising citizenship and encouraging reading in a totally unexpected place, which has now been given a new lease of life. The Altice Foundation's reading booths project is part of a vast program within the scope of Altice Portugal's Social Responsibility, which focuses on key areas such as culture, education, music, sport, the Portuguese language and social intervention.