Fred and Joe Bills, co-owners of Escape Hatch Books, are awaiting approval for their new non-profit Escape Hatch Foundation.
“Over the last few years, Fred and I have been talking about putting together a 501 (c)(3),” Joe said.
Fred added, “It has become such common knowledge to those close to us that whenever I visit my general practitioner, without fail, he asks, ‘So how’s the non-profit coming along?’ Now I can finally give him a concrete answer.”
The Escape Hatch Foundation “grew out of a simple, repeated observation: Many people who say ‘they don’t like reading’ are not resistant to stories at all – they are resistant to the ways stories are most often offered to them,” according to the foundation’s overview.
Its mission is to promote literacy and a lifelong love of reading by expanding access to comics and graphic literature for people of all ages, with a vision of creating a world in which every reader can find stories that welcome them in, build confidence, and open lifelong pathways to learning.
“My first set of comics were hand-me-downs from my brother,” Fred recalled. “Eventually, I started combing through spinner racks at book stores to see what kind of comics they had. When I discovered X-Men, that was it, I was permanently hooked.”
“The first seed for this idea came from Fred’s experience discovering X-Men for the first time on the spinner rack,” Joe said. “The second seed came from our annual Halloween giveaway in which we hand out comics to trick-or-treaters.”
In order to see through with its objective, the Escape Hatch Foundation initially plans to set up pop-up spinner display racks around New Hampshire to distribute free comics. One already exists in the Dublin General Store.
“The Dublin General Store spinner rack was an accidental pilot for the foundation,” Joe said. “I’ve been eating there since my early days at Yankee magazine, so I know the owners well. I asked about setting up a comic spinner, and they happily obliged.”
The core idea behind the Escape Hatch Foundation is that comics lower barriers to reading. There is a decline in reading engagement among children and teens, particularly in rural and low-income communities, according to the outline in the foundation’s plan.
“We see them as a gateway drug. After reading their first comic, kids will want to read more. This, hopefully, will be the first step to them developing a lifelong reading habit,” the brothers said. They see comics as a bridge to literacy, not a replacement for it.
To fund the non-profit, the men are looking at grants and donations supplemented by earned income from reprint projects, subscription clubs, educational kits, community retail partnerships and events.
They are waiting on the approval from the state to go through with the plan, and also need approval from the Internal Revenue Service for the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
Joe said that, unlike when they started the business, they have been thinking about the foundation for some time. He said he and Fred “spent about a month talking about the business before going all in, whereas the foundation has been in the works for a number of years.”
“When first planning the business, Fred was working with our father doing shipping with a FedEx truck and he absolutely hated it. Meanwhile, I was working a job marketing in Nashua that paid well but that I also hated.”
For the first two years, the brothers funded the business entirely with paychecks from our other jobs.
“We started it with zero dollars in the bank and no other shop to compare it to,” Joe said.
Fred said that pure stubbornness is the reason the business is still going all these years later.
For more information about the Escape Hatch Foundation, visit escapehatchfoundation.org.