Next Chapter Book Club members at a meeting in April, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Jillian Ober
For those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Next Chapter Book Club, or NCBC, offers a safe space for these individuals to build community and strengthen their literacy skills.?
First starting as a program under Ohio State’s Nisonger Center, NCBC has spent the past 25 years growing to offer hundreds of book clubs for those with disabilities like autism or down syndrome across the country, Jillian Ober, the program’s manager said.?
Including the 15 clubs offered within Franklin County, these clubs are hosted in libraries, cafes and restaurants for an hour each week and are run by two to three volunteer facilitators, Ober said.?
“One of the greatest things that Next Chapter Book Club does is really help create community for folks,” Ober said. “To know that each week on, Thursday night, I’m gonna see my friends at book club. [It] can make a big difference for a lot of people.”?
Charles Franz, volunteer for the organization and medical student at Ohio State, said NCBC offers a place where anyone with a disability feels welcome to attend, especially since spaces are usually limited for them.
“[NCBC] wanted to create a space where people with disabilities could gather together, have a social group of friends, allies, like-minded individuals and just read a book,” Franz said.
The clubs welcome members of any literacy level, Franz and Ober said.?
“For a lot of our members, reading is something that they either cannot do because of their disability or something that they never had access to the education to help them,” Franz said. “It’s not so much about teaching reading or trying to get people up to a certain level. It’s more about going to where their level is.”?
Volunteer facilitators help run club meetings and aid members if they’re struggling during their turn to read,? Ober and Franz said. Volunteers are taught by Ober, who adjusts the training based on the amount of experience each volunteer has.?
“Some people are coming to us just thinking ‘This is a great idea,’” Ober said. “[They’ve] never worked with people with disabilities before. Then, there are people who grew up with a sibling with a developmental disability.”
Franz graduated from Ohio State with a minor in disability studies and took a gap year after graduating. He said he wanted to volunteer for a disability serving organization and came across NCBC during his research, just in time to start volunteering before beginning medical school.?
“I found Next Chapter Book Club and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, it’s literally out of OSU,” Franz said “I’m gonna be here for like, the next four years.”?
While there is not an overall set structure, each club includes a talking section before members take turns reading from the chosen book. However,? this plays out differently from club-to-club and meeting-to-meeting, Franz said.?
“Sometimes, people just want to show up and talk because life has been crazy,” Franz said. “It’s part of creating that space and that’s what’s really important to me. Sometimes, it means understanding the challenges that these individuals could be facing outside of book club.”
In addition to reading books, Franz said the meetings are a space to build a community and support system.
“There’s stressful things that people go through and with a disability, it makes it worse,”? Franz said. “Book club is a place where, yeah, we’re going to sit down and read books. But it’s also a place where if you need to talk to your friends or your facilitators, to your people, we’re here.”
Reading order, book choices and meeting locations are decided by club members with the help of the volunteers, Franz said.?
Ober said she tries to place new members in clubs that match their tastes, location and availability.?
“We have one club, for example, that loves dystopian fiction and that’s really their lane. If I have a new member that’s like ‘I like happy, brighter things,’” she said. “I’m not going to place them in that club because that’s not going to be a great fit.”
Franz said it is all about taking the time to understand the members of the club and forming decisions based on them.
“It’s a lot of fielding their requests because the whole point is like, we want them to lead the club,” Franz said. “We decide on books by vote. We decide on location by vote. If we want to take a break in terms of the holidays, we decide on that by vote.”?
The Nisonger Center has a lending library that club members can choose books from, but they are also welcome to check books out from Columbus Metropolitan Library locations or to buy their own books, Ober said.
Franz said his book club used to meet at a Panera Bread before moving to a coffee shop in Westerville.?
“The reason we switched locations is because the Panera got kind of loud and we had some new members who were more noise sensitive,” Franz said. “But while we were at the Panera, one of the members just became super close friends with one of the workers.”
After the move, Franz said he had gone back to school and returned to the Panera location to study independently. The employee approached Franz and expressed missing seeing the club every week.?
“I think it was like ‘Oh shoot, we made a community connection with this member because of this space,’” he said. “I get free pastries at Panera now.”?
Franz and Ober said they value the personal connections that can be made while facilitating NCBC.?
“Not all volunteer opportunities give you the opportunity to really have face-to-face contact with the people you’re serving,” Ober said. “This is nothing but that for an hour a week.”?
Franz said he agrees on the importance of the group.?
“You see the impact of getting people together and watching them build their own community,” Franz said. “That means they’re going to get the things they need. And that’s very heartwarming.”?
NCBC is always accepting new volunteers, Ober said. Applications are available on the NCBC website and people interested in becoming a member can email Ober to be matched with a club in their area.?
Franz said direct connection with the disabled community and learning to work through access barriers can help someone broaden their understanding of accessibility.?
“It’s really important to understand that disability is, in the end, a universal experience. It’s not a matter of if you’ll encounter your own disabilities, but a matter of when,” Franz said. “We all grow old. We all end up needing a walker at some point, right?”
