Looks like there’s a pot of fundraising gold at the end of this rainbow.
LeVar Burton helped launch a Kickstarter campaign Wednesday to bring his classic educational show “Reading Rainbow” to a new generation of youth, and it’s on track to blow past its donation goal in a matter of hours. The fundraising drive aims to raise $1 million to take the program to the web and into 1,500 classrooms nationwide at no cost to the schools.
As of 6 p.m. Wednesday evening, it had already surpassed $800,000. (Update, 1:15 p.m., Thursday: it’s now past $1.8 million.)
“Reading Rainbow” went off the air in 2009. Since then, Burton launched the successful “Reading Rainbow” app for tablets, but he cited the lack of access to tablets as a reason for utilizing Kickstarter to bring the program to a wider audience.
“Over the past year, I have watched Kickstarter bring communities together to support artists and inventors,” Burton said on the campaign’s page. “Again and again, I have been inspired by watching like-minded people team up to accomplish impossible dreams, and to change the world.”
The crowdfunding platform seems to be well on its way to helping another group accomplish its goal.
