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Today, Reading Rainbow is more popular than ever. Since copurchasing the rights to the franchise after the show’s cancellation in 2009, Burton, 57, has been on a mission to make it bigger and better in the digital space.
Two years ago, he and his business partner Mark Wolfe re-imagined the TV show as a tablet app, which has since been downloaded more than a million times. Now, they’re creating a Web version.
In May 2014, to raise capital to build it and to get children and their families excited about books again, the pair turned to the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. In a mere 11 hours they met their $1 million goal. At press time they were only about a million short of their new $5 million target. “Every day of the first three days of the Kickstarter,” marvels Burton, “we raised a million dollars.”
The actor, who made his name as “Kunta Kinte” in the 1977 miniseries Roots and, later, as “Geordi La Forge” in the long-running TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, credits his 19-year-old daughter, Michaela, with the crowd-funding idea. “Michaela is of this generation, a digital native. She said, ‘Why don’t you guys just do a Kickstarter?’ As a 30-year-old brand, if we were to very publicly ask for money, then fail, it would’ve probably been game over.” But that never happened and they raised over their goal in a shorter amount of time that anyone could have predicted.
At a time when 66% of American fourth graders aren’t proficient in reading (source: 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)) and slightly more for African American children, the need for literacy-building programs is evident. Burton’s Kickstarter funds are being used to develop two subscription-based versions of a Reading Rainbow website: a home edition for kids and families, and a classroom version for teachers with accompanying lesson plans.
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“This is my mission—and has been for 30 years. My commitment to connect children to the magic of the written word is not likely to change any time soon.”