Rally for Reading Raises Nearly $20,000

A nonprofit, Room to Read, hosted a Rally for Reading, raising nearly $20,000 to help build and stock three new libraries in developing worlds.

On November 16, the Westchester Chapter of Room to Read, a nonprofit organization that strives to empower impoverished children across the globe through literacy and gender equality in education, held a Rally for Reading luncheon at the Larchmont Shore Club that raised almost $20,000 for the organization's cause. The money will help build three new libraries in the developing world and fill them with age-appropriate children's books and trained librarians.

For one Room to Read volunteer, Larchmont resident Mony Liquard, the cause hits close to home. Now a mom of two (and pregnant with her third child) and a director at GE Capital in Connecticut, Liquard is a survivor of Cambodia's killing fields in the late '70s, when the country's educated people were eliminated and its school system collapsed. She still remembers her early years of "school" in one of the Khmer Rouge communist regime's labor camps in the mid-1970s, where lesson plans were "all about obeying the government and spying on your parents and other people." Liquard and her family fled across the border to Thailand when she was 8 years old.

Mony Liquard and her two children. Courtesy Mony Liquard.

"Reading, writing, and learning are like candy for children in rural Cambodia because it's a luxury," Liquard says. Her firsthand experience inspired her to volunteer with Room to Read, to help present underprivileged children educational opportunities as a way out of poverty.