We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Claire Bennett And Jonathan Haupt a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Claire and Jonathan , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
We’re always grateful for new opportunities to share DAYLO’s origin story and to talk about our roles as mentors to DAYLO’s student leaders.
DAYLO (Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization) began in 2019, created here in Beaufort, South Carolina, by then-sixteen-year-old Holland Perryman. She was inspired, in part, by social justice-themed literary programs she experienced as the first student intern of the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center. In that role, she was being mentored by Jonathan Haupt, the Center’s executive director.
As an intern, Holland routinely got to meet and introduce or interview local and visiting authors. And she was helping organize literary programs, from writing workshops to book discussions to literary festivals. Those experiences showed Holland how literature could be a conduit for strengthening her community, fostering empathy, and welcoming difficult but essential discussions of complex subjects. Holland’s internship with Jonathan had such a positive and inspiring impact on Beaufort, it was covered in local newspaper and magazine stories.
During the COVID-19 shutdown, the Conroy Center responded through virtual literary programming—connecting with authors and audiences who might have never had opportunities to meet in person. For Holland, that included a conversation with YA fantasy author Kalynn Bayron, author of Cinderella Is Dead, and also introducing a discussion with Anika Noni Rose, the first African American Disney Princess. Speaking about allyship, Ms. Rose told the audience that they “needed to do the work for themselves” to find their own meaningful roles in social justice advocacy in their communities. Although Holland and her family had participated in Black Lives Matter marches, at that moment she questioned whether she was doing enough.
So Holland decided to do more. On her own, she created the idea for DAYLO, a book club at Beaufort High School (BHS) through which students could read diverse books of their choosing as a means of having hard conversations and inviting empathy and understanding. From the beginning, DAYLO embraced the idea of reading as a form of advocacy. Holland’s vision also included community outreach to engage younger readers and to show support for educators. BHS administrators approved the newly created club, and DAYLO quickly became BHS’s largest student-chartered organization, participating in on- and off-campus community literacy service, in addition to its book club discussions.
By early 2022, the Conroy Center gained two additional student interns, both BHS DAYLO members: Alisha Arora and Millie Bennett. With Holland, they became the public face of DAYLO in community engagements in collaboration with the Center.
Holland, Alisha, and Millie were invited to present success stories from DAYLO’s first year at the annual conferences of the South Carolina Council of the Teachers of English and the Palmetto State Literacy Association. Responses from educators to a student-led diversity-themed book club were extraordinarily positive. Millie’s mother Claire Bennett, media center coordinator for Beaufort Academy (BA), a private school, accompanied the group to the SCCTE conference. Soon after that, Claire was inspired to create a DAYLO chapter at BA, which she still advises, in addition to also serving with Jonathan as a mentor to all of the DAYLO student leadership team members.
In the fall of 2022, two Beaufort County community members challenged 97 books in Beaufort County School District libraries, resulting in those books being removed from student access while a year-long review process began. DAYLO student leaders decided to respond to this book ban, recognizing that DAYLO could be a vehicle for organizing fellow students who also wished to engage in pro-literacy, anti-censorship advocacy. Six students from three high schools–Millie Bennett and Madelyn Confare from BHS, Elizabeth Foster, Patrick Good, and Peter Cooper from BA, and Isabella Troy Brazoban from Battery Creek High School (BCHS)–emerged as a consistently positive presence at our District’s school board meetings and community events, speaking in favor of intellectual freedom, educators and librarians, and families’ rights to choose for themselves (but not for everyone else) what books their students can access.
DAYLO earned local, regional, and ultimately national recognition as a successful model of youth-led pro-literacy advocacy in response to education censorship. The students of DAYLO were speaking out and being heard, and they were inspiring others to do the same.
At the end of the review process for the 97 books challenged in Beaufort County, the vast majority, 91 books, were returned to circulation and restored to students’ access.
In recognition for their youth advocacy and for pro-literacy community service, DAYLO has been profiled nationally on Nick News and in Education Week, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Book Riot, and regionally with front-page news articles in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Post and Courier and the Beaufort Island News, and a recent feature article in Beaufort Lifestyle magazine. DAYLO also received a national commendation from the American Association of School Librarians, and DAYLO students have been featured presenters at the annual conferences of the American Library Association and the South Carolina Association of School Librarians.
Fourteen DAYLO student leaders also helped create the youth advocacy toolkit for the national resource, GetReadyStayReady.info.
Nine active DAYLO chapters now exist across South Carolina, with more forming—each with its own student leaders and adult advisors, and each using DAYLO’s pro-literacy vision to engage in book discussions on campus and community service off campus in ways that are impactful and rewarding to their schools and their communities. It’s an honor and joy for us to serve as mentors to the student leaders and adult advisors of all of those chapters, and to be invited to represent DAYLO in interviews like this one.
Claire and Jonathan , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
As a diversity-themed student book club, much of the focus of DAYLO’s work is on the book club itself. In an effort to support that, DAYLO advisors and mentors are always looking for opportunities to enhance the impact of book club selections through direct contact with authors. Sometimes that involves field trips to book festivals, like the Lowcountry Book Club Convention in Bluffton, South Carolina, the Savannah Book Festival in Savannah, Georgia, and YALL Fest in Charleston, South Carolina, where students have opportunities to hear from authors of books they have read or might consider for book club selections in the future. Other times, that contact is made via virtual meetings with authors of book club selections, like one we recently had with author Elana K. Arnold, who spoke with members of three DAYLO chapters about her YA historical novel, The Blood Years, which won the Sydney Taylor Book Award for Jewish fiction in 2024. This was such a powerful conversation that covered everything from questions about The Blood Years, to a discussion of Ms. Arnold’s writing process, to advice for young creatives in a world that often feels chaotic. This meeting was such a great representation of what we strive to do within DAYLO: expose students to diverse literature and in the process help them to develop a broader understanding of the importance of storytelling so that they can carry that reverence and knowledge into their adult lives.
Additionally, DAYLO students are introduced to authors through attending events hosted by the Pat Conroy Literary Center, like the social justice-themed March Forth weekend where they have been able to have one-on-one conversations with authors J. Drew Lanham, Rebecca Hall, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow. They have also been able to meet formally and informally with other authors visiting the Center for public programs, including Raj Haldar, Jason Mott, Sidney Keys III, Anjali Enjeti, and Laila Sabreen.
The event that DAYLO is best known for within our Beaufort community and beyond is our monthly Teddy Bear Picnic, a favorite event for both kids and adults. This pro-literacy community event is held the first Saturday of every month at our destination farmers’ market, the Port Royal Farmers’ Market. Students from all five Beaufort-based chapters of DAYLO, as well as students from various National Honors Societies, Interact Clubs, and Key Clubs, come together to read diversity-themed picture books to children and their families, many of whom have become regular attendees. Similarly, students have also had the opportunity to participate in read-aloud events at Title 1 schools and the Pat Conroy Literary Center’s annual Children’s Book Fair, as a result of the success of the Teddy Bear Picnics. There is such great value in teenagers modeling a love for reading to elementary-age students and we believe in facilitating that dynamic as often as possible.
During Banned Books Week in October of 2023, in addition to participating in two national live-streams for the American Library Association and the Children’s Book Council, DAYLO students stocked a dozen local Little Free Libraries with pro-literacy, pro-library, pro-education books. This portion of our community service has become a regular part of DAYLO’s mission–and a growing one, as well. Each Beaufort DAYLO chapter has an assigned route of Little Free Libraries they are responsible for keeping stocked and organized. As efforts at censorship are increasing, DAYLO’s Little Free Library project is directly aimed at combating the reductive nature of censorship with the additive act of increasing access to diverse literature for our community. In addition to the traditional Little Free Libraries, DAYLO students have also created and donated two little library Book Boxes to local laundromats, which are spaces where kids often are but books aren’t, which makes them uniquely impactful.
In 2022 Conroy Center intern and DAYLO member Alisha Arora partnered with community organizers to bring a local version of the Human Library to Beaufort. This event is aligned with DAYLO’s mission of fostering empathy through storytelling and features human “Books,” community “Readers,” and DAYLO students as “Bookmarks.” In their role as Bookmarks, DAYLO students serve as guides and facilitators for both the Books and the Readers. The Beaufort Human Library continues as an annual event held in April during National Library Week. Inspired by her experience with the Beaufort Human Library, DAYLO student leader Zoe Way started her own version at Battery Creek High School. This on-campus version of the Human Library has now been held three times and has received much praise from community members, educators, and school administrators.
As previously mentioned, DAYLO students began advocating for intellectual and academic freedom in the fall of 2022. While the challenge to 97 books in Beaufort County public school libraries has ended, the legislative advocacy work has continued at the state level. In February of 2024, 20 DAYLO members traveled to the Department of Education in Columbia, South Carolina to testify before the the State Board of Education in opposition to proposed changes in regulations regarding the selection and reconsideration of library and classroom materials. DAYLO students spoke powerfully that day, as they have on many prior occasions, in support of the academic and intellectual freedom of their peers and their teachers. Students were also introduced on the Senate floor and had the opportunity to meet with several pro-education state legislators. Not every DAYLO student chooses to be involved in legislative advocacy, nor is that ever a requirement.
One of the lessons we want students to learn as a result of their DAYLO experiences is that there are multiple viable ways to have a positive impact in your community. What is most important is that students (and adults) find the path to advocacy that is the most meaningful to them, which ultimately makes the work more enjoyable and sustainable.
As a result of DAYLO students’ pro-literacy, anti-censorship advocacy work, we often receive speaking invitations from local organizations. Several of these DAYLO talks have been combined with book drives, in partnership with our local children’s bookstore, the Storybook Shoppe. As a result of several of those book drives in 2023 and 2024, DAYLO was able to not only continue stocking Little Free Libraries, and purchase books for our book clubs, but we were also able to donate pro-literacy, pro-library, pro-education book bundles to every single public school library across the Beaufort County School District.
One aspect of the work that we are most proud of is the supportive relationships that have formed between DAYLO students, and also between students and mentors and advisors. Our foundational values of inclusivity and empathy, as well as our reverence for the power of storytelling, have created a unique environment that fosters a spirit of mutual respect and learning that has ultimately allowed for new bonds to be formed between DAYLO members from multiple chapters across the state of South Carolina. These supportive relationships, forged through this mutual understanding and respect between individuals, is, after all, what community should be. Our greatest hope is that everyone who is involved with DAYLO will continue to carry the positivity they have found in DAYLO into their broader lives, and especially in the case of DAYLO students, into their very bright futures.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
DAYO is foremost a student-led diversity-themed book club, with a community literacy service component. The students who are drawn to leadership roles in DAYLO tend to be high achievers with world-saving tendencies, and therefore the same students who also have active leadership roles and volunteer service commitments in other aspects of their lives, as well as an abundance of AP and honors classes to excel in. They are some of the smartest, busiest, most ambitious kids you will ever meet–and mentoring them gives us tremendous hope for the future of humanity. But guiding them into their adult lives also means encouraging self-care and always making sure DAYLO is a supportive, safe, and trusting environment. This is key for not only ensuring the group’s pro-literacy mission is possible for students but also for curating an experience in which that mission is a pleasure to carry out, for students, advisors, and mentors alike.
The kinds of books DAYLO students read and discuss can be challenging and uncomfortable, and intentionally so, but that’s where the work of education and positive social change happens. Likewise, it can be eye-opening for some students to glimpse into the experiences of their peers in these discussions, or to experience part of those lives first-hand in our community outreach into Title 1 schools, for example. And pro-literacy advocacy against the backdrop of a national rise in book bans and education censorship attempts, led by a small but loud and antagonistic group of extremists, is inherently difficult and draining. All of which leads to an even greater need to help students navigate their responses to this environment and to offer them opportunities for rest, reflection, and recreation along the way.
Sometimes DAYLO runs on cookies, ice cream, pizza, and a lot of Taylor Swift. (Whatever might seem like a reasonable amount of Taylor Swift–it’s way more than that.) Beyond that, DAYLO is made possible through respect, empathy, and compassion. Committing to our positive, pro-literacy mission is what empowers that vision and inspires so many others when they meet with our student leaders.
DAYLO also runs on generosity, and we’re really fortunate and grateful that our many supporters have consistently helped DAYLO take part in advocacy work at the state and national levels, and that they have donated books for our student book clubs and public read-alouds, and for free distribution to the many Little Free Libraries and school libraries across the communities we serve.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Because DAYLO has become so visible regionally and nationally, we’re often contacted by others wanting to engage youth advocacy in response to censorship challenges in their communities. Consistently, our advice is to start with a student-led book club–not because the book club is a precursor to advocacy, but because the book club is advocacy. And it is, in our experience, what makes DAYLO most meaningful and impactful for students and advisors alike.
The candid conversations, immersive discussions, and reflective self-discoveries that happen as a result of reading and discussing diverse literature with a group of young people are transformative–which is exactly why access to stories and histories from diverse perspectives are so frightening to book banners and education censors. Giving students a safe and welcoming space in which they can read and discuss books of their choosing, beyond what is required of them by school curriculum, helps them form individual and community identities, ask and answer difficult questions, and commit themselves to being lifelong learners on journeys of self-discovery and self-empowerment. That’s the power of books, and that’s the reward for a lifetime of reading, both individually and as engaged members of literacy communities. That’s also why books and stories need their champions, now more than ever. Experiencing that firsthand through book club discussions is the act of advocacy which makes all other aspects of our pro-literacy mission possible.
What’s also most essential to understanding the success and popularity of DAYLO’s vision is that from the very beginning of Holland’s original vision for a student-led book club, our model has emphasized positivity. DAYLO is and has always been a pro-literacy movement. Book bans and acts of censorship are reductive and subtractive; they’re all about taking away books, histories, identities, safety, identities, and respect. In contrast, DAYLO’s model is additive. We’re all about using books and literacy as opportunities for giving and growth, for advancement of the ideals of democracy, for a welcoming invitation into the inclusive house of literature where stories can teach us how to live impactful and fulfilling lives; how to overcome and heal from trauma, loss, grief, inequity, and inequality; and how to create and sustain communities where differences are valued and embraced.
And from that foundational value, there are so many different opportunities for DAYLO members to decide for themselves what their lives as readers and community-minded servant leaders will be and will become over a lifetime. For us to be entrusted as their mentors to guide them through these initial chapters of what will be the great big stories of their lives is both an absolute honor and an absolute pleasure.
INTERVIEWEE BIOS:
Claire Bennett is the media center coordinator at Beaufort Academy, where she is staff advisor to the Beaufort Academy chapter of DAYLO. Jonathan Haupt is the executive director of the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center, and past director of the University of South Carolina Press. Together, they serve as co-mentors to the student leaders and advisors of all DAYLO chapters.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/DAYLOBFT
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daylo_reads
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DAYLO.reads
- Other: https://www.beaufortlifestyle.com/2024/05/01/daylo/
Image Credits
Lead photograph: Jenny Phillips, All other photographs: DAYLO