Invisible Children has linked up their amazing “Schools for Schools” program with Better World Books, and the results are sure to be spectacular.  Haven’t heard about IC?  Well, they’re an amazing group of folks in SoCal who have created a documentary and mobilized a nation’s worth of students to help partner schools in Uganda.  Why Uganda?

” The war in northern Uganda has been called the most neglected humanitarian emergency in the world today. For the past 23 years, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GoU) have been waging a war that has left nearly two million innocent civilians caught in the middle. The GoU’s attempt to protect its citizens from this rebel militia has largely failed, leaving an entire generation of youth that has never known peace.

Since Invisible Children: Rough Cut was filmed in 2003, night commuting has ended for the children of northern Uganda. For the past few years, the region has been closer to peace than ever before. From June 2006 to March 2008 in Juba, Sudan, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GoU) engaged in a series of peace talks in order to end the conflict. These peace talks, supported by special envoys from the United States and other nations, allowed for the longest period of peace in northern Uganda’s 23-year war. “

Unbelievable right? It gets better. Through the schools for schools program they managed to raise over $3 million last year (wow!). Now, not only can students in the program raise money for schools, they can run book drives as well. In addition to the millions of dollars raised, schools are going on a full assault getting stacks of books for those in need. One school in Vermont will have shipped 30,000 books by the end January. That’s just one school amongst the hundreds across the US that are involved in the project.

Chris Johnson, Better World Books’ organizer of the epic Great American Book Drive (which by now you know is the biggest community based book drive in the US) just dropped me a line about the recent event in Boston:

“The drive went very well, we collected about 13,000 books and everything went super smooth, and I’m itching to begin the national rollout.”

Nice!

Rather than me tell you how it went, considering I was over 2700+ miles away, I’ll let the Boston Herald do their job:

“Bay Staters paged through their book collections for donations to the annual Great American Book Drive, held yesterday at the Brighton-Allston Congregational Church UCC in Brighton.

“It was actually a good excuse to clean out my book shelves,” said donor Stewart Ulm, 27. “They were getting a little unwieldy.”

The Web developer donated about 150 tomes to Internet bookseller Better World Book’s annual drive. The donation ran the gamut from GRE study guides to novels to nonfiction chronicles. He gave nearly as many last year.

The drive from Better World Books collected tomes to sell and raise money for the Prison Book Program and City Mission Society of Boston.

Last year’s effort brought in more than 20,000 books. Since 2003, the for-profit Better World Books has raised more than $4.7 million for the nonprofit partners.”

Last week the Florida teacher volunteers returned from Guatemala, where they implemented a teacher training project that focuses on reading.  Your Better World books were a big part of the supplies we delivered and taught the rural Guatemalan teachers how to best use in teaching the students to read.  This Saturday we are having a planning meeting to discuss the future of this project.  It has worked well in two rural schools (both built with funds from Miracles in Action), and now we are ready to take the program to other schools.  Of course we need lots of books.  I will send you a few photos of the kids reading the books you shipped.  Your staff may enjoy seeing how their efforts have benefited some very poor children, who are totally grateful for the blessing of books.

Many thanks,

Penny
Founder/President
Miracles In Action, a 501(c)(3) non-profit
www.MiraclesInAction.org

After completing a very successful book drive, the three recent graduates decided to start and organization dedicated to running campus book drives in support of global literacy.

Today, just four years later, Better World Books is working with students and bookstores on than 900 campuses throughout the United States and Canada . A map showing the location of all of BWB’s partner campuses as of August, 2006 appears below. See if you can locate your campus…

Yet promoting literacy on a college campus is not all about yourself. The personal rewards one gains go beyond personal satisfaction, extending to a measure of character development and leadership practice that could not be easily attained in the classroom.

If you look at the “7 Best Habits” of effective people popularized by Stephen R. Covey, nearly all of them directly speak to skills practiced through fundraising on college campuses. Covey’s habits deal with self-mastery, considering that private victories of character will precede measurable success. His habits involve teamwork, cooperation, and effective communication. And finally, Covey’s seven habits culminate in self-mastery and lifelong character development based on core virtue.

Habit 1 — Be Proactive, take initiative. Fundraising takes time away from other activities. Proactive people are driven by values intimately tied to their sense of being. Correspondingly, those who take the time away from their own lives to empower people they will never meet do so out of a reflection of their own inner virtues.

Habit 2 — Personal leadership. Act on your principles, and lead by doing the right thing. Know your values and subsequently manage with efficiency. Develop and stick to your own personal mission.

Habit 3 — Effective personal management. Fundraising on campus, especially if in the form of book collections, requires time managing skills as well as the ability to juggle tasks between volunteers and campus entities.

Habit 4 — Think Win/Win. Develop strategies that result in the best result for all actors. When fundraising through book drives, certainly there are winners on every side.

Habit 5 — Communication is most effective when conducted with empathy. Understand an individual or organization before communicating with them. Build trust with the volunteers in your group, the administrators on your campus, and extend these relationships to all those in your personal and professional life.

Habit 6 — Synergy. Value differences and synergize. Promoting literacy is an expression that all understand themselves and the world around them. As a leader, you want to extend skills, not knowledge or assumptions. You are a facilitator, not a lecturer. In doing so, you develop your own sense of humility and reverence to the great benefits from communication.

Habit 7 — Balanced Self-Renewal. Reflect upon your actions and how they respect your own personal values. Live one habit and you increase the ability to practice the rest.

For more info check out “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey.

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.

Paying cash to students for books your store can’t use is a conundrum.

One the one hand, students enjoy receiving something—anything—for their unwanted book; but, more importantly, students hate leaving your store with their old books in hand; according to TRU Research, students’ second largest complaint after cost of books is that their store doesn’t accept all books at buyback.  Sessions at both CAMEX and ConTEXT went to lengths to highlight this point.

On the other, paying cash for books which offer your store little or no utility doesn’t make a lick of sense, not even to a simple country boy like me.  Why buy something you can’t use?

Here is one solution:  Through a program we’ve been piloting with members of the NCBA, we reimburse your store for any cash outlays in exchange for the books.  Plus, we pay postage.  We developed this model with tremendous input from stores like yours.

I appreciate the non-solicitation policy of this listserv, and just wanted to let you this program is available. Ueli Stadler (Reed College, NCBA President) among others, can attest to its success.

As many of you know, Better World Books is social enterprise modeled after Goodwill Industries; we offer for sale some of the books we receive, with their proceeds supporting a host of literacy organizations, primarily Books For Africa.  Incidentally, one post on this topic humorously suggests Brad and Angelina floating the bill to send the books to Africa. While we’d love such an act of generosity, we’re not waiting for charity; we’re sustainable.

Under “Strategic Goal: Sustainability Policy” in NACS Board of Trustees “Memo from the Boardroom”: NACS is committed to engaging in environmentally friendly practices and utilizing sound business practices.  What’s good for the environment and your bottom-line is a beautiful marriage, and we applaud NACS recent decision to join the Higher Education Sustainability Council.  We’re glad to share this path with you, and are proud our model allows us to help solve the sustainability conundrum—how to give students cash for books you don’t need.

This week we received some staggering literacy statistics from the National Center for Family Literacy. Two of the most impressive are:

• 61% of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children (McQuillan, Jeff. “The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions.” 1998.)
• More than 40 percent of U.S. adults at the lowest level of literacy live below the poverty line. Only four percent of adults with strong literacy skills live in poverty.

Your books make a difference.