The Important Thing about The Rabbit hOle is...
Dear friends,
Just over two years ago, in 2024, The Rabbit hOle opened as a living monument to children’s literature — a one-of-a-kind American experience built to preserve and advance the culture of reading across generations. Every exhibit was meticulously crafted, every program carefully designed.
Of course, our work was just getting started, and since then we have continued to expand the museum with more environments and experiences as more stories find a home here. In 2025 alone, we added eight new exhibits, increasing the museum’s footprint by more than 8,000 square feet.
This year we’ve already opened two more new exhibits, and we just put the finishing touches on our Story Lab — a beautiful new program space adjacent to our print shop where young writers will craft their own stories. With two more floors and 60,000 square feet to go, The Rabbit hOle itself is a never-ending story.
Yet the most important things inside the museum are not ours to build: a child seeing himself in the pages of a book; a student meeting her favorite author; a grandparent rediscovering and sharing a beloved story; a family quietly reading together as laughter rings across the museum floor.
These are the everyday moments that truly complete The Rabbit hOle and bring it to life.
In a world where literacy skills and comprehension are in precipitous decline despite our best efforts, where only 16% of Americans read for pleasure on any given day, where book challenges in schools have reached record rates, where libraries are being dismantled and school librarians are rapidly becoming a rare breed, where Internet Addiction Disorder is devastating the reading lives of young people, where A.I. is all but destroying the desire (or the need) to write and to think for ourselves — we need to make sure places like The Rabbit hOle continue to grow and thrive.
The literacy crisis goes on and on, like a forever war, and we must acknowledge that remedial solutions are not enough. We need places of pure inspiration and imagination. Monumental places that bring young people and their families together with literature in new and unexpected ways. This is what The Rabbit hOle does, every day.
This summer we welcomed our 300,000th visitor. We are reminded that every person who walks through our doors helps shape the museum, adding a new sentence to the story we write together. We are committed to bringing even more voices into that story, which is why every donation in response to this midyear campaign will go toward making The Rabbit hOle more accessible to more people.
We ask that you make a gift today to help us open the doors to thousands more in our community.
Your support will help ensure that cost is never a barrier — providing access to children and low income families through our Museums for All program, welcoming Title I students on field trips at no cost, and distributing thousands of free books for kids to build their own home libraries.
Please join us in our ongoing mission to bring young people closer to literature. Books are essential to the life of the mind. And that is something worth fighting for.
With warm regards and gratitude,
Pete + Deb
