Area youth will get a chance to tell the world their dreams while helping to raise literacy awareness.

On Thursday, the Moonshot Moment Rocket bus from Florida will be stopping at the Oxford Skate Park, across from the Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library from noon until 2 p.m.

At the bus, youth will be designing a tapestry, made up of their own dreams. They will fill out a piece of the tapestry that asks them, “Where are you from? What is your name? What are you dreams? — and then allows them to draw a symbol of their dreams.

LOU Reads recently became a finalist for the National Campaign for Grade Level Reading All-America City award, and in doing so; put Oxford on the Rocket buses’ itinerary.

The “Voices: A Community Tapestry of Stories” project is based on the work of Kentucky’s 2015-2016 poet laureate — George Ella Lyon, and her poem “Where I’m From.”

From Colorado to Florida 

The Moonshot Rocket will begin its journey in Denver, Colorado for the Grade Level Reading week, and then visiting six Grade Level Reading Pacesetter Award-Winning Communities on its 2,000-mile journey to Indian River County, Florida, and stopping in Oxford on Thursday.

The “Voices/Tapestry” project is an arts-enriched literacy community connection experience designed to make early literacy/reading at grade level a national priority. Through this project, Moonshot Moment will be collecting the “stories” from the LOU community, and then weaving them together in a large tapestry that will eventually serve as a moving art installation.

Acknowledging that schools alone cannot address all the challenges that keep children from learning to read, the Moonshot Community Action Network works with nonprofits and other partners to ensure that children arrive at kindergarten ready to succeed, attend school regularly, and keep learning through the summer months.

Locally, Moonshot works with LOU Reads, Excel by 5 and the Mississippi Campaign for Grade Level Reading and the United Way of Oxford.

“This tour bus highlights the issues our state and nation faces when it comes to third-grade reading proficiency,” said Edy Dingus, an AmeriCorps VISTA with the United Way. “It’s tough to get there, and it’s good to open a dialog about something so important, especially a dialog that engages people of all ages. We can talk about how to make this better, especially on the local level.”