During Q3 of 2006, Better World books generated $13,459.59 for New Orleans Public Library through the online sale of donated books.  That brings the total amount donated to the Rebuild NOPL campaign to $19,183.67.

Since the beginning of the partnership, over 3,000 cartons have been delivered to our warehouse from around the country.   We look forward to raising even more money during the final quarter of 2006!

In addition to providing material and financial support to over 70 non-profit organizations that focus on literacy and education, Better World Books has donated over $475,000 to our campus partners, including student leaders, service clubs, and campus bookstores.

This is unrestricted funding that the recipient(s) can use however they wish, from offsetting membership dues, to paying for registration and transportation to regional and national conferences, to donating to a local charity. The possibilities are endless!

One bookstore in the Rocky Mountain Region has a novel approach to taking advantage of the funding generated from their campus book drives: Bookstore Scholarships! Between Fall 2005 and Spring 2006, Montana State University-Northern generated $350 through the collection of “no-value” college textbooks, and recently awarded two $187.50 scholarships.

The recipients - Conrad Flynn and Michelle Courchene - were selected from the pool of students who paid cash for their books this semester, and will be able to take advantage of their scholarships during the Spring semester book rush.

Jason Degele, manager of the MSU-N Bookstore, is thrilled that partnering with Better World Books benefits not only Room to Read, but also the MSU-N campus community. His hope is that even more students will take to buying their books directly from the bookstore so as to be considered for the next round of scholarships, which will be awarded in the Spring.

We at Better World Books hope more and more bookstores will take advantage of this unique opportunity to serve their students, and invite any managers who are interested to contact their Regional Director about how they can get involved.

I have recently had the great experience of attending both the Virginia and Middle States Phi Theta Kappa Regional Leadership Conferences, in Morgantown, WV and Dundalk, MD. I was thrilled with the enthusiasm and motivation that I saw in the Phi Theta Kappa chapter representatives that I met. I met dozens of friendly and outgoing students and faculty advisors that are really geared up for this year's upcoming book drives.

In addition to my excitement about how ready and willing the Phi Theta Kappa members are to support our efforts in raising funds to promote literacy, I was also very grateful for the open and friendly reception that I was given. My experience at these leadership conferences has been both fun and rewarding for me personally. In Morgantown I was included in talks and team building exercises and then invited to the James Madison football game by one of the chapter members. At the Middle States conference in Dundalk I had the pleasure of listening to Sister Claire, a professor from Boston University, give a lecture on the state of education in the United States, and her insightful thoughts on the need for a paradigm change in the American educational system. It was an awesome and inspiring lecture.

I have greatly enjoyed being able to personally get to know the Phi Theta Kappans in the Southern Mid-Atlantic Region. It has been a great experience for me, and also has produced some great relationships that are dedicated to supporting our mission of promoting literacy around the world.

Thank you Phi Theta Kappa!

Dear Computer Lab Supporters:

The computer lab has gotten off to a great start.  The building has been completed, powered and outfitted with ten laptops, a printer, and furniture.  Classes began on 31 July.  We have seven basic computer skills classes with eighteen students each that will run for nine weeks.  Students are currently covering formatting in Microsoft Word before moving on to Microsoft Excel.  Additionally, other FORGE projects have utilized the computer lab, such as the new Mwange Journal and the Women's Leadership and Empowerment Program.

In August, we held a community-wide contest to name the computer lab.  From the many entries, John and I chose pieces and formed the name Laboratoire Informatique Safari, in English - Computer Technology Lab: Journey.  With the help of another FORGE worker, we hired some community artists to help us design and paint an incredible mural on the inside wall with a  laptop whose keys turn into the cobble stones of the path.  The desktop scene blends into the scenery of mountains, forests, a river and a lake.  A man is traveling down the road, carrying the bundles of hay so commonly seen here, and a woman is rowing her boat across the lake, filled with packets of the typical Boca fish.

We have also developed the area around the computer lab and library, by funding the construction of new outhouses and a water tap.  Coordination with other Implementing Partners (i.e: Red Cross and World Vision) has been rewarding.  Upon returning we are going to put a sign up on the outside wall of the computer lab with our new name and logo.

Our plans for the future are expanding.  In October, we will reach further out in the community to select our next group of students,  with classes tailored for secondary school students, vulnerable women, Mwange management sectors (such as Red Cross's Water and Sanitation), the Zambian community and Mwange Community members at large.  We will also be adding more advanced classes, such as typing classes and continued practice sessions for students who have already completed the first round of classes.  We will be recruiting and training selected students to become Educators for future computer classes and monitors for computer center activities.

Over the next year, John and I will also be busy as FORGE's project managers for Mwange and Kala Refugee Camps.  Through collaboration with the refugee and implementing partners, our team's projects have been amazingly successful.  The Mwange Journal sold out its first issue, and reporters are already busying compiling new articles.  The students from the Women's Empowerment Class have come together to plan reproductive health seminars for their community.  The Poetry Club performed its first of their monthly shows for the community, on of hip-hop and rap and the other of poetry.  The Mwange Women's Agricutural Cooperative has prepared their new piece of land and will be planting seedlings in the next couple weeks.  Face AIDs is preparing to follow suit with their own soya farm to support people with AIDs and orphans both financially and nutritionally.  A core group of peer mentors from the the HIV/AIDs Awareness and Recreation Program will continue classes and education for the community.  The Peace Club is beginning its own vending business in order to become financially self-sufficient.  Students from the piano and guitar classes have amazed us with their talents.  The library is bustling with books and their readers.

None of this could have been accomplished with out the resounding support and assistance we have received from you.  So, with gratitude from all of us and the Mwange community, thank you so much.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Amani na Furaha,

Jolie and John

Computer Center Directors

This weekend I attended a Phi Theta Kappa leadership conference in Newton, Iowa. It was an unseasonably cold day with a biting 20 degree wind blowing fiercely outside. Despite the chill, it was very sunny, not only outside but inside as well.

The welcoming smiles and sincere embraces that Phi Theta Kappa greeted me with warmed me through and through. Members from 27 chapters drove hundreds of miles to learn how to make themselves stronger leaders for a tomorrow that I hope to be part of. When they had a free moment to chat we shared stories of our families, our pasts, our hopes and our dreams. We got to know each other not only as the person on the other end of the phone or email line, but also as friends.

Everyone kept thanking me for coming to speak to them about Better World Books, but I'm the grateful one. So to everyone of the Iowa Phi Theta Kappa Leadership Conference: Thank You. Thank you for your embraces, smiles, applause, hospitality, and for sharing your lives and time with me. Thank you for wanting to be better people and stronger leaders. Thank you for all the good things you do for your community and our world when so many people today look out only for themselves. Thank you for all of your hard work, for running successful book drives, and for supporting BWB and our literacy partners. And thank you to everyone else who supports BWB; thank you for saving books from landfills, for helping to break the cycle of poverty through education and literacy, and most of all thank you for making this world a better place!

Yanna C. Ogilvie
Midwest Regional Director

It's been a busy week in the Logistics office, starting and ending with a bang.  Monday found the Campus Division Support Agent (myself) navigating a very large truck through the streets of Chicago to pick up 9 pallets of books generously donated by the Chicago Public Library's Friends of the Blackstone Branch.  The streets of Chicago never felt so narrow, but with the help of a few dedicated volunteers, especially Betsy Glynn, my navigator, and Dina Weinstein, our contact at the book sale, we were able to get about 9000 books boxed up and loaded in under two hours.  Great job and thank you to everyone involved! 

Now Friday has finally arrived, and we ended our week in the warehouse by sending our second shipment of approximately 18,000 college text books directly to the Kampala International University in Uganda. 

We have more of these direct shipments scheduled and we will try to keep everyone updated as they go out.  In the meantime, everyone have a fantastic weekend, and keep those books coming!

Books for Africa a "key" priority
Ryersonian 10/11/2006, by Izabela Szydlo
http://www.ryersonline.ca/articles/539/1/Books-for-Africa-a-quotkeyquot-priority/Page1.html

The Golden Key Honour Society is trying to help open doors to literacy in Africa.

The group, which targets top students in each department, has partnered with a charity organization called Books for Africa.  The hope is to promote higher education in the continent which struggles with combating illiteracy.

“Our main goal is to collect textbooks which are no older than five years old,” said Vipin Khullar, president of Golden Key’s Ryerson chapter.

“If you’re trying to educate people in other countries all the books need to be up to date.”

The book drive, which will consist of boxes placed in high-traffic areas such as Jorgenson Hall, brought in about 700 books last semester.  Khullar said students can be expected to see boxes out next week.

“My goal is to raise more books than any school in the northeast region,” he said.  “With every event that we do I try to get Ryerson’s name out there and show a sense of community that the university has.”

Namarig Ahmed wants to help support the cause, but the second-year nursing student said that the campaign needs to be better advertised and students need to be made aware of what the boxes are.

“I’m definitely going to drop off some of my older texts,” she said.  “But I think people may pass the bin and say: “why should we send some random book to Africa?” without realizing that they collect a whole bunch of the same book and send it off.”

According to the Books for Africa website, since 1988 more than 13 million books have been donated in hopes of putting an end to illiteracy, which stands at 41 per cent among Africans over the age of 15.

The organization is partnered with a larger literacy campaign called Better World Books, which provides boxes and funding so that books can be shipped
directly to classrooms and libraries.  Books are sent to 26 countries, including Botswana, Senegal and Sudan.

Jennifer Hargreaves, director of Canadian operations for Golden Key, said that the campaign is not only positive but also reflective of her organization’s goals.

“It really supports our goals of supporting higher education and academic achievement,” she said.

“We’re helping students understand basic human rights and allowing them to take a more direct role in the educational process.”

By Sarah Lynne Reul, New England Regional Director.

As you may already know, Better World Books joined forces with a great new literacy partner over the summer. The World Education and Development Fund (a.k.a. “Worldfund”) is a young non-profit organization dedicated to reducing poverty in Latin America by funding high-quality education for impoverished children. Visit their website www.worldfund.org to learn more about the programs they support in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

Worldfund’s mission is essential, as fewer than 30% of students in Latin America complete secondary school. The absence of an educated workforce is a critical factor stunting economic development and discouraging investment in Latin America. However, Worldfund is already making an impressive impact - in just three short years, they have already raised over $2 million to fund school networks that support more than 30,000 children across Latin America.

If you choose Worldfund as your partner this semester, here’s the impact your qualifying books can make:

500 books: Fund a one-year student scholarship at a top quality school 
1,000 books: Fund the purchase of materials for a 35-student classroom
2,000 books: Fund four student scholarships at a top quality school
5,000 books: Fund a teacher’s salary for a full year
10,000 books: Fund two teacher’s salaries for a full year

We’ve already developed new posters for Worldfund campus book drives, complete with space to write the name of your student group– see below! Better World Books is moving towards greener materials – all Worldfund posters will be printed with biodegradable “eco-ink” on 25% post-consumer recycled paper, in a carbon-neutral printing process.

Better World Books is proud to include Worldfund as a potential partner for your campus book drive this semester, along with our other great literacy partners, Books for Africa, Room to Read, and the National Center for Family Literacy. Talk to your Regional Director today to find out how you can get involved in a book drive for Worldfund!

 

By Elena Kuzmin, Co-Vice President of the University of Toronto’s Golden Key Chapter. 

This past spring, our Golden Key chapter collected 94 cartons of books to benefit Books for Africa, making it one of the most successful drives in the Northeast region. The strength of our book drive can be largely attributed to our extensive promotional campaign. Promoting our book drive helped us to do more than let people know where they could donate books.  It also helped us connect the students and faculty memebers to the cause of African literacy and education.  To get the word out around campus we used flyers, posters, mass emails and made class announcements.  We also had an article about the book drive written in the campus newspaper. 

Of all the promotional methods we utilized, class presentations were the most effective.  We found that posters, flyers, emails and newspaper articles were all great ways to spread the word, but they often blended into a vast sea of campus postings and daily emails.  However, when we were in front of a class making an announcement about the book drive, there was no way the students were going to miss us. 

Hearing about the book drive from fellow students helped our classmates to understand the impact their donation would have on global literacy. It also helped them to understand how easy it would be for them to get involved and become part of the solution.  After all, making a difference is as easy as dropping a book in a box.   

The best part was that organizing such an extensive promotional campaign didn’t require too much time.  Since we started promoting our book drive by the middle of the semester, we were able to exercise all our promotional options and have everything in place well before finals started.  On average, getting everything set and ready to go only took one to two hours a week. 

I wouldn’t recommend replacing posters, flyers, emails, and newspaper articles with class announcements, but I would definitely recommend using class announcements to compliment them.  It worked for our organization and it will definitely work for yours!

By Damara Lauren Catlett, Northern Mid-Atlantic Regional Director.

For too many people literacy vs. illiteracy has become a question of life vs. death. Understanding the correlation between illiteracy, disease and poverty is not intended to contribute to fear and helplessness felt by many when observing the severity of HIV/AIDS crisis. Rather these studies are a cue for what we can all do today to combat this pandemic. UNESCO reports that: 

“Given the impact of the epidemic worldwide, with nearly 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS, the role of literacy and non-formal education needs to be fully acknowledged and promoted as part of the overall response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.”

The most at risk population for contracting HIV/AIDS are the rural poor, particularly woman and girls who comprise 70% of the world’s impoverished population.  Our international literacy partners Books for Africa, Room to Read and World Fund serve the most vulnerable communities by helping them obtain the life long tool of literacy which assists in the reduction of poverty and access to education and appropriate information with regard to health related issues.

Although, our book drives encourage the small and simple act of donating a used textbook, the collective impact and results of these acts of kindness are anything but small. What’s so exciting about Better World Books is that by addressing illiteracy, one of the factors contributing to disease and poverty, we are able to provide a tangible way to address the gargantuan statistics and despondency surrounding the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

 

Mary Murphy writes:

Recently, I was on the United Nations Website as I know that the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has long been a strong supporter of literacy to combat poverty worldwide.

I was surprised to find in his Executive Summary of the Millenium Report: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, an alarming chapter on the environment.

In addition to freedom from want and from fear, Mr. Annan writes, the world now faces an urgent need to realize a third freedom, which the UN's founders could not have anticipated: "the freedom of future generations to sustain their lives on this planet".  He continues, “We have been plundering our children’s heritage to pay for environmentally unsustainable practices in the present.”

Environmental sustainability is everybody’s challenge.  I am very proud of the fact that Better World Books philosophy is congruent with Kofi Annan’s plea to protect the health of our planet.  We have saved more than 1,200 tons  (over 5 million pounds) of books from the landfill….and we have never thrown one book away.

We couldn’t have achieved this without our student organizations taking the lead on campus.  It’s amazing to think that at a University with an undergraduate enrollment of 5,000 students…and each student has, on average, 5 college books with an ISBN # in a given semester…..there are 25,000 books that could be used to help others.  Donating a textbook is such a simple, yet powerful way to make a difference!

Check out the new website for the National Center for Family Literacy at www.famlit.org.  You can find information about the partnership with Better World Books on the front page under success stories!

A few of us here at Better World Books recently had an opportunity to speak with a reporter from The Michigan Daily, and they have run an article on our book drives in Michigan.

In the Spring of 2006, Better World Books coordinated book drives at 32 schools in the state of Michigan, totaling close to 20,000 books. Michigan State University collected the most books of any school in Michigan, sending in over 5,000 books. The book drive at Michigan State was lead by their "Books 4 Africa" student group. All the books collected in that drive went to benefit Books for Africa.

With over 150 colleges and universities in the state of Michigan, I hope we can have a lot of success with book drives there this year. I expect to see a lot of healthy competition between the The University of Michigan and Michigan State Universityto see who can bring in more books.

The Michigan Region of Phi Theta Kappa, the International Honor Society of the 2 year college, is encouraging all of their chapters to run a book drive with Better World Books this year. I am expecting great things from the state of Michigan this year! Below is a picture from the MSU B4A student group:

 

 

 .

News Release:  9/27/06

Believe it or not, there are millions of children and families who want to read but don’t have access to libraries or worthy resources.

That is about to change for thousands of American Indian families. Much needed books are making their way to American Indian parents and children in family literacy programs across the nation thanks to Better World Books and the National Center for Family Literacy.

The effort will support the literacy development of families participating in the Family and Child Education (FACE) program funded by the Bureau of Indian Education and in operation in states including Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, New Mexico and Mississippi. The FACE program is coordinated by NCFL and is the nation’s longest running family literacy program.

Many of the sites are located in remote desert or plains areas where there are no main libraries and schools have limited resources, according to NCFL. More than 25,000 books will be given to families with children birth to eight-years-old.

“We’re going to be providing books to a lot of families that just don’t have books in the home,” said NCFL’s Sharyl Emberton who coordinates NCFL’s services to the FACE program. “Families who attend programs in these schools will be able to select a variety of books. They will be able to build their own home libraries.”

The high-quality books are the result of partnerships with over 500 local libraries who give their discarded and donated books to Better World Books to benefit their literacy partners.

Better World Books initiated its partnership with NCFL immediately following the 2005 Hurricane Season to provide a long-term solution to the social and economic devastation and has contributed more than $80,000 of cash funding to support the organization’s literacy initiatives.

In addition to the FACE program, NCFL works with literacy programs throughout the U.S., helping families in need gain necessary literacy skills. Each year, NCFL programs help more than 60,000 individuals by supporting programs including the Hispanic Learning Institute, the Bureau of Indian Education’s Family and Child Education program, and—most recently—providing relief to families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

 

Phi Theta Kappa, the national honor society of two year colleges, has announced that Al Gore will be the keynote speaker at their International Convention in Nashville, TN in the spring of 2007.  As part of the environmental theme, PTK's international service project this year is Operation Green.

I am so excited to see that an honors society and service organization as large and influental as PTK is taking to heart the messages we are continually seeing in the media about the environmental crisis our planet is experiencing.

I saw the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and watched the Tom Brokaw special on the Discovery Channel called "Global Warming: What You Need to Know" and I was inspired to take action and make an impact.  I went out and bought the energy saving lightbulbs, and I have been trying to recycle more, and think about my energy and gas consumption.  I know that it seems small, and like these actions don't get us anywhere, but it is when a group of people make these changes, and influence the decisions of others that change really takes place. 

A Better World Books book drive is a great opportunity to take action and empower yourself, your student organization, your community, to come together and take action. By leading a book drive on your campus you will be encouraging students to donate their no-value books rather then throw them in the trash.   Thousands of students have made this choice, and the result has been 5 million pounds of books being diverted from the landfill through the BWB book drive program.

"By the year 2100, in the lifetime of our children and grandchildren, our world will be a drastically different place," says Tom Brokaw in the Discovery Channel documentary. 

For the students in this country, the young people, this is our future.  Now is the time to take action.