New library official is a veteran bookworm

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At 22, he's the Library Commission's youngest member.

Kyle Alderson is the Tulsa City-County Library's newest and youngest library commissioner. SHERRY BROWN/Tulsa World

By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Staff Writer
Published: 1/20/2009 2:21 AM
Last Modified: 1/20/2009 2:35 AM

Kyle Alderson has been working to promote literacy and libraries for nearly half his lifetime — all 22 years of it.

Alderson is the most recent addition — as well as the youngest member ever — of the Tulsa City-County Library Commission.

He was appointed last year to the commission by Mayor Kathy Taylor to serve a three-year term.

"I've always tried to be active in whatever community I'm living in," Alderson said.

"And I've done a lot of work with libraries over the years."

That's putting it a bit mildly.

Alderson was 14 when he came up with the idea for the Read program — Reading Encourages All Dreams, a mentoring program that pairs high school students with elementary school students who are struggling with reading or simply want to increase their reading abilities.

"My parents were both teachers at Muldrow High School," Alderson said. "In fact, there are about 17 teachers in my family, 14 of them English teachers.

"So reading was something that was always encouraged and was something that I really loved to do," he said.

But then Alderson came across a statistic that showed that fewer than half of the adults in his hometown had graduated from high school.

That brought home to him the importance of reading in a person's education, and he put together the Read program.

"It started out as a reading mentoring program, but it sort of developed into a life mentoring thing," Alderson

said.

"We would meet once a week, and after a while the participants were sharing things that perhaps they thought they couldn't with another family member or friend."

The Read program, now in its eighth year, offers a $500 college scholarship and has helped raise funds to install computers in the children's area of the Muldrow Public Library.

Alderson's work in establishing the program brought him a number of national honors, including a grant for $10,000 from actor Paul Newman's Newman's Own Foundation to buy books for the library in Muldrow.

Alderson now runs a consulting firm, Victrix Strategies, that works primarily with nonprofit organizations and political campaigns.

He also attends the University of Tulsa, where he is pursuing a law degree.

He said he hopes to be able to help the library expand its programs dealing with literacy among children.

James D. Watts Jr. 581-8478
james.watts@tulsaworld.com

By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Staff Writer

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