Today we’d like to introduce you to DAYLO (Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization) in this interview with DAYLO mentors Claire Bennett and Jonathan Haupt.
Hi DAYLO, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
We’re always grateful for opportunities to share DAYLO’s origins and to talk about our roles as mentors to DAYLO’s growing number of 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 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.
Holland 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. The three students were invited to present success stories from DAYLO’s first year at the annual statewide 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 co-mentor to all of the DAYLO student leaders.
In the fall of 2022, two 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 local 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. Unfortunately, book banning in South Carolina has now escalated to the statewide level, with a new policy, Regulation 43-170, enacted by the State Board of Education, which has already resulted in new statewide bans, including books previously challenged, reviewed, and successfully returned in our community.
DAYLO continues to be a nationally recognized model for pro-literacy youth advocacy community service., having now 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. DAYLO students are also featured the documentary film Banned Together, which has been screened for audiences across the country.
DAYLO has also received a trio of awards: (1) a national commendation from the American Association of School Librarians at the recommendation of the South Carolina Association of School Librarians, (2) the Richard W. Riley Civil and Human Rights Award of the South Carolina Education Association, and most recently (3) an honorable mention for the Intellectual Freedom Award of the South Carolina Library Association.
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.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
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 are 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. 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. 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 our students.
DAYLO also runs on generosity, and we’re 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.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
DAYLO was invited to create a pro-literacy youth advocacy toolkit for the national resource website of Get Ready, Stay Ready and READCON, and we’re happy to share that is now publicly available at https://readcon.info/pro-literacy-youth/ and https://www.getreadystayready.info/pro-literacy-youth. The toolkit reflects the work of nearly twenty students (and both of us), representing almost all of DAYLO’s active chapters and current and past leadership teams. The toolkit emphasizes the importance of DAYLO’s pro-literacy approach and foundational importance of the book club and of the acts of reading and supporting diverse literature as forms of advocacy. Here are a couple of examples of what DAYLO does, but keep in mind there’s so much more in the new toolkit.
Much of the focus of DAYLO is the book club itself. 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, the Savannah Book Festival, 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. At this year’s YALL Fest, in between filming short videos for a PEN America advocacy collaboration, we were able to meet with amazing author/advocates Maggie Toduka-Hall and David Levithan, and that in turn has also led to opportunities for collaboration with Authors Against Book Bans (AABB).
DAYLO students are introduced to authors right here in Beaufort through their participating, on- and off-stage, in events hosted by the Pat Conroy Literary Center. They have been able to have conversations with authors J. Drew Lanham, Rebecca Hall, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Sidney Keys III, Anjali Enjeti, Laila Sabreen, and National Book Award winner Jason Mott. Most recently, DAYLO students got to meet with bestselling authors and fellow pro-literacy advocates Raj Haldar, Kirsten Miller, Kwame Alexander and Amanda Jones, all of whom continue to be in touch and be supportive of the students.
Other times, DAYLO has been able to meet virtually with authors of book club selections, like 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. More recently, DAYLO students from four chapters had the opportunity to meet virtually with Samira Ahmed, author of This Book Won’t Burn, a YA novel about an anticensorship book club very much like DAYLO. That too was an empowering conversation, and Ms. Ahmed seemed as grateful to meet DAYLO as we were to meet her.
During Banned Books Week this year, DAYLO was active with multiple events every single day. Also during Banned Books Week, we were able to attend multiple screenings of the Banned Together documentary, stock dozens of Little Free Libraries in our community with pre-literacy books for all ages, and mail postcards of gratitude and thanks to librarians and fellow advocates. Beyond local efforts, DAYLO also appeared in three nationally livestreamed panel conversations for PEN America and the American Library Association (ALA) focusing on the vital importance of student advocacy in issues which directly impact their education. Through those experiences and several since, we’ve been able to collaborate with Julia Garnett, the ALA Banned Books Week Honorary Youth Chair and one of GLAAD’s 20 Under 20. Julia was later able to visit with us in person in Beaufort and participate in advocacy panels and discussions for students and for the public.
One of DAYLO’s most popular public programs, which we’ll be repeating this spring, is our Beaufort Human Library collaboration. 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, past DAYLO student leader Zoe Way started her own version at Battery Creek High School, a legacy now continued by current DAYLO member Zayda Pruit. This on-campus version of the Human Library has been held four times and has received much praise from community members, educators, and school administrators.
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. For some of our students, that has meant boldly addressing audiences of adults who clearly disagree with them, for others it has meant writing postcards or stocking little libraries or reading diverse picture books to their must younger peers, or volunteering with our Beaufort Human Library. What is most important is that students (and adults) find the path to advocacy that is meaningful to them, which ultimately makes the work more enjoyable and sustainable. Having a positive relationship with advocacy and mentorship as teens will also resonate into the students’ adult lives and they continue to find ways to advocate for issues they believe in and to become mentors themselves.
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.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Mentorship is definitely a key aspect of the DAYLO experience. We’ve both been fortunate to have the benefit of excellent mentors in our professional lives, folks who guided us through apprenticeships as gateways into our professional development. In our experiences, the best mentors—and those most eager to serve as mentors—are those who have directly benefited from impactful mentorship in their own lives and who are already part of a lineage of mentors and mentees.
For DAYLO, the overarching model of effective mentorship and servant leadership is that of the late Pat Conroy (1945-2016), the much beloved author and educator so readily associated with his adoptive hometown of Beaufort.
When Pat was a student at Beaufort High School in 1962, a parent called for a ban of the J. D. Salinger novel The Catcher in the Rye. The novel was being taught by Pat’s mentor, English teacher Gene Norris, who successfully defended Salinger’s novel with the school board. In doing so, he also made a point of teaching Pat how to stand up to censorship from a pro-literacy vantage point. Years later in 2007, when Mr. Conroy was asked to help a high school student and teacher in Charleston, West Virginia, defend two of Pat’s novels from censors, Pat wrote a scathing letter to the editor in defense of educators, students, and literature, recalling his boyhood experiences with Gene Norris as the framework for his believe in empowering students and trusting educators.
Pat himself was only a classroom teacher for three brief years, but in those years he modeled the principles of servant leadership he had learned from his own mentors, including Mr. Norris, and inspired many of his students to become teachers themselves, Gullah chef and historian Sallie Ann Robinson and award-winning fiction writer Valerie Sayers chief among them. Pat continued to mentor writers and teachers over the course of his roughly 50-year career as an internationally celebrated authors—and Jonathan is fortunate to be one of those mentees.
DAYLO was founded by a Conroy Center student intern in response to programs she experienced which were meant to honor Pat’s legacy. DAYLO is a continuation of that legacy, and it has brought a whole pantheon of amazing student leaders into the lineage of mentors and mentees that included Conroy and Norris, and now many others as well.
These students champion literacy, engage in difficult but essential conversations through books, and work hard to build bridges in a world that often seems determined to tear them down. They are harnessing the power of storytelling to change the world, starting with their own communities. And it is in those communities, among experienced likeminded fellow advocates and educators and servant leaders that other mentors are also waiting to be found.
For us, that means exemplifying the kindness, empathy, encouragement, and support that creates the positive and welcoming environment of DAYLO. This extends to our chapter advisors, too, all of whom are school librarians and English teachers. They too are always willing to help, and they truly care about every student. Collectively, we continually seek out new opportunities and connections for students as individuals and as a group.
Since DAYLO is now approaching our fifth year, we also have the benefit of peer-to-peer mentoring from some of our inspiring past student leaders as well. The experiences of those students guided DAYLO into becoming the group it is today, and we’re grateful that they have been so willing to help share their experiences.
In 1968, after his first year of teaching at Beaufort High School, Pat Conroy wrote a letter to his former high school principal and lifelong mentor Dr. Bill Dufford that included this promise: “That is immortality. For what I have learned from you, I will pass on, and it will be passed on and passed on.”
In the work we do as mentors to our DAYLO students, we strive to embody that legacy on passing it on, in full faith that our students are learning how to pass it on as well.
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
