3R Festival: What to know about this weekend's free event promoting reading and literacy

When Michael Silva, founder and co-owner of Rude Boy Cookies, was challenged by his friend to try and boost literacy rates in New Mexico, Silva took the challenge by storm in an attempt to promote reading in youth communities.

“I wanted to bridge the gap that Black and brown kids are seeing when it comes to access and education and reading and literacy and how that gap has grown since COVID,” he said.

The 3R Festival — a free, family-friendly community event centered around literacy — was Silva’s solution. Now, Silva is bringing the festival back for its second year.

Making an impact: 3R Festival promotes reading and literacy for its second year

“As I see stories about the challenges New Mexico’s children face, I wanted to create something to celebrate the written, spoken and sung word,” Silva said. “Access to books can make all the difference in sparking a child’s joy of reading, and I hope everyone will come out, bring some books and have a great time.”

The 3R Festival is a reimagined idea of promoting traditional reading, writing and arithmetic and instead showcases the 3 R’s: rude, rhymes and reading.

Rude represents the variety of music styles, with a heavy focus on reggae and ska. It is also a homage to Silva’s history as the founder of Rude Boy Cookies. Rhymes connects to readings by poets. Reading is the center of the entire festival, with discussions about the power of written and spoken word.

“The genesis of this event was trying to create an opportunity for the community to come together to support reading and literacy and poetry, and kind of trying to get our kids and our community and understand that reading is cool,” Silva said. “We wanted to create it to be a free event for the city, because we wanted to eliminate any barriers for folks to come out and have a good time and enjoy some live music among friends and family and community, and while also understanding that there’s a bit of a bigger issue there, which is, let’s encourage our kids to read.”

Throughout the day, seven bands will give live performances. In between each band, local poets will have 15 minutes to perform their poems and writings. Following the poets, local dignitaries will talk about their love of reading, share their favorite authors, share excerpts from stories and discuss how literature has impacted their lives. There will be a variety of artisan booths at the event selling merchandise.

With the help of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Silva was able to create a book drive for the event.

“We’re asking people to bring new or gently-used books to donate, and then we will redistribute them back into the community,” he said. “Last year, we collected about 1,000 books and we got those books back out to various nonprofits here in the community that were able to get them to their specific community. The books go really quickly, probably within the first two weeks post-festival.”

Everyone who donates a book will be gifted a guest pass to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

This year, Meals on Wheels, the Boys and Girls Clubs and the Native American Community Academy are some of the nonprofits that will be at the festival. They will have booths at the festival to teach guests more about their programs and how the community can support them.

“The event is something that the community needs and I’m a firm believer that the more we can gather, the more we can get together, the better we are, and the better chance we have in kind of solving some of these greater issues that we face as a community,” Silva said. “I believe that if we can just gather, get together as a community and put our heads (together) on these types of things, we can actually truly make some impact.”