Over the last few months, I’ve been keeping you posted on the Books for Books project undertaken by my covenant group. (If you’re new to The Daily Voice, the first and second articles are archived on the Different Voice blog.) In summary, a literacy report stating that in low-income neighborhoods, the ratio of age-appropriate books per child is 1:300 caught the attention of our group. We dreamt up “Books for Books”. We had a used book sale and raised money to purchase new books for every child at a local elementary school.
Our church has an established partnership with one of the local elementary schools, so it seemed natural to choose the students at this school – 504 of them – as the recipients. By shopping Scholastic Warehouse Sales in our area and online, we were able to meet our goal of purchasing two new books for each child. We asked the teachers for recommendations of age-appropriate books for each grade level to get us started and then we went shopping! The elementary school has a large number of Spanish-speaking (English as a Second Language) students, so we bought some books in Spanish. Students who speak Spanish at home were invited to choose one Spanish book and one English book.
On June 1st, three days before the last day of school, the day we had been anticipating arrived. Our group headed to the school with over 1,000 brand new books to give away. We laid the books out on tables by grades (K and 1st, 2nd – 4th, 5th and 6th). During the next three hours, each class visited and the kids were able to choose two books from the appropriate tables. It was truly a joy and a delight to see the seriousness with which the children approached this task and their eagerness to read the books they selected. Many of them sat down and began reading as soon as they’d made their choice. One of the local newspapers did a nice write-up of the distribution (with only one mistake). We had planned to have leftover books, so that even the last children choosing books would have a choice, and these we left at the school for the teachers to distribute to children who were absent that day, and then to use as they chose.
From beginning to end, the Books for Books project has been amazing. For me, it has been a testament to the success of ministry that develops when a group of people see a need, dream up a response, and passionately pursue it.
~Sally Hoelscher