Great news!  As you probably already know, promoting literacy has always been woven into the fabric of our business.  Now we’re delighted to announce we’ve given an ownership stake to our non-profit literacy partners.   Yup…we’ve granted Incentive Stock Options to these partners – as far as we know, a first for social enterprise.

The purpose of the plan, put together with the help of our primary investor, Good Capital, is to ensure that our literacy partners can have a stake in and share in our financial success.

We’ve put aside roughly 5% of the company for use in stock option grants to an initial group of five literacy partners (with potential to add others in the future):  Books for Africa, Invisible Children, Room To Read, WorldFund and the National Center for Family Literacy.

One of our fearless leaders Xavier Helgesen puts it best:  “We created Better World Books to show that it is possible to do good while at the same time run a successful company.  Our literacy partners are essential to our mission, and we want them to flourish.  Today’s announcement ensures that as our company grows, our partners will too.”

Check out the press release to get all the details. Or read more about it at Change.org.

We are so proud of what your support has been able to do for our Non-Profit partners.  So far we have:

With your help, Books for Africa, Invisible Children, Worldfund, Room to Read and the National Center for Family Literacy are doing amazing things to increase literacy around the world!

Thanks!  And please keep spreading the word!

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.

The international organization created the revolutionary fundraising program in 2006 in response to the need for quality schools in northern Uganda – schools that have been destroyed by displacement, rebel occupation and lack of funding due to the 22-year war. Schools for Schools uses an innovative online social community to help students see where their money is going and connect to different projects, fundraising ideas, and supporters. Within its first year, students rallied together and raised over $3 million.

The World’s Biggest Book Drive will build upon Schools for Schools’ innovative fundraising strategy and will help complete the ambitious projects at Invisible Children’s eleven partner schools in northern Uganda.  Through a Partnership with Better World Books, a global bookstore that harnesses the power of capitalism to bring literacy and opportunity to people around the world, over 1,000 student groups will be invited to join the movement by leading community-wide book drives.

A winner of the 2008 Fast Company Social Capitalist Award, Better World Books is a fast-growing social enterprise that collects donated books and sells them online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide.  Through partnerships with more than 1,600 college campuses and 900 libraries nationwide, Better World Books has generated over $4.7 million for its non-profit, library and college partners, donated 1 million books to literacy programs globally, and diverted nearly 13.5 million books from landfills.

The World’s Biggest Book Drive will utilize the passion, creativity and hard work of student groups inspired by the GO documentary, and the technical and logistical expertise of Better World Books, to collect, sell and donate used books in support of schools in northern Uganda.

“What’s incredible about this program is that it relies on the most unlikely donors – high school and college students – to raise the money, allowing them to believe that they have what it takes,” said Laren Poole, Invisible Children co-founder and GO Director. “At the end of the fundraising and book drive competition, the top students have the chance to visit their school in Uganda to meet students their own age. It’s a story come full circle.”

Xavier Helgesen, a co-founder of Better World Books, believes the partnership with Invisible Children is unique in that “it allows ordinary citizens across the U.S. and Canada to support lasting peace in Uganda by donating a national resource in vast supply in both countries – used books.  Books cluttering up their closets, stuffed under their beds, and collecting dust on their shelves will be transformed into dollars to support literacy and international development.”

22 all-expenses-paid trips to northern Uganda will be awarded to student groups that raise the most money, collect the most books, and offer the most creative ideas for propelling the Schools four Schools movement.

The World’s Biggest Book Drive starts on September 8, 2008, and will end on January 31st, 2009.

About Invisible Children, Inc. Established in 2005, Invisible Children is a social, political, and global movement using the transformative power of a story to change lives. By inspiring youth culture to value creativity, idealism, and sacrifice, the movement fuels the most effective, adaptable, and innovative programs in the world. Invisible Children, Inc. was formed after the release of the film “Invisible Children: Rough Cut”, which documents a war in northern Uganda in which children are abducted by a rebel army and forced to fight as child soldiers. Currently, Invisible Children is putting 740 kids through school and employs more than 250 men and women living in this war-torn region, with plans to see that number grow. These programs on the ground were developed by the people of northern Uganda and seek to improve the quality of life for individuals through quality education, enhanced learning environments and innovative economic opportunities. www.invisiblechildren.com.