LeVar Burton's Reading Rainbow Kickstarter Campaign has already been an enormous success. The Star Trek star and former Reading Rainbow host reached out to fans to help him bring an updated Reading Rainbow program back to the public and the fans responded and then some, helping the campaign reach its goal within the first day. Since then, the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign has set a new goal, which it hopes to reach within the next five days and Seth MacFarlane has offered to contribute in a big way.
LeVar Burton announced on the Kickstarter page that Family Guy creator and A Million Ways to Die in the West actor/director Seth MacFarlane has agreed to match every dollar pledged passed the $4 million mark, up to a million dollars. The campaign has currently raised $4,137,194.
As Burton notes, this contribution will help them reach their extended goal of $5 million, which would allow Reading Rainbow to reach even more platforms and classrooms.
That's right: for each dollar pledged over $4,000,000, Seth will MATCH IT, dollar for dollar, up to 1 MILLION DOLLARS! And let me tell you what that means, because this is important:• If we can reach our $5M stretch goal in the next five days, we'll meet our goals of bringing Reading Rainbow to more platforms and 7,500 classrooms.• AND that means that Seth will provide a full $1,000,000 in matching funds, taking us a total of $6,000,000, and letting us reach 5,000 MORE CLASSROOMS!• That means that if we raise the remaining million, we won't just get 7,500 classrooms... we'll get more than 12,500 CLASSROOMS!
The original Reading Rainbow aired on PBS and encouraged kids to read. Though the TV show went off the air, the program returned a couple of years back as an app. Burton is looking to revive the program, build a new app, designed for classrooms and teachers, make the existing versions of the program accessible online, and offer free year-long subscriptions to the full Reading Rainbow library to at least 1,500 classrooms. At least, that was the goal when they were trying to raise a million dollars. With more money pledged and the newly set $5 million goal, it sounds like LeVar Burton hopes to do even more with the new Reading Rainbow.
Seth MacFarlane may be better known for animated comedies and the films he's made, but he's also demonstrated an interest in educational entertainment, as he's among the executive producers of the Fox documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Matching the next million dollars pledged in this Reading Rainbow campaign on Kickstarter is a generous offer from MacFarlane, and from the sound of it, his contribution would extend the reach of the Reading Rainbow program substantially. So if you're thinking about donating, consider that every dollar you contribute will count twice, when factoring in Seth MacFarlane's matched dollars.
