Give Books for a Greener Home from Better World Books on Vimeo.

This Earth Day Week, if you’re thinking about greening your home, check out this story on Designing Spaces’ environmental show Think Green featuring Better World Books.

Think Green’s mission is to “re-educate, re-think and re-consider the environment as part of our economy, health and community, and effectively live an eco-friendly lifestyle and to respect our planet earth.”

“Think Green” featured BWB as an environmentally friendly company with a social impact. Correspondent Debi Marie interviewed our President and CEO, David Murphy, about how donating your used books and buying re-used books from our site is also helping promote global literacy. At BWB, we never throw a book away! We either sell the books to raise funds for our literacy partners around the world, donate the actual books to under-served communities through Worldfund, Books for Africa and Feed the Children, or have the books recycled.

Here are a few highlights of the ways that the BWB community is helping save the planet:

• Re-used or recycled over 60 million pounds of books
• 19,000 tons of carbon balancing on BetterWorldBooks.com shipping
• In the UK we partner with Carbonfootprint and Tree Appeal who plant a tree for every ton of carbon emissions produced, balancing our carbon footprint

Not only do we <3 books, we also <3 the Earth and all the people on it!

Part 2 is on the way!

Libraries serve a very important function in our communities.  They are a valuable resource for children and adults.  Libraries offer a wide range of services from helping people find jobs to offering workshops for small businesses.  And they are often the only place to access the internet for the 34% of the US population who do not have computer access at home (“Home Broadband Adoption,” Pew Internet and American Life, 2010).

Libraries tend to reflect the communities they serve.  They tailor their services to the needs of the people in their areas.  And when new resources are needed to help the local community, libraries will seek funding to make their projects a reality.  That’s where we come in.

Better World Books is a huge supporter of libraries of all kinds and we are aware of the financial struggles they face.  It is why we decided to make available $75,000 to be distributed to libraries who have compelling projects which will make a dramatic impact in their communities.

Libraries have up until March 25th to submit their “Game Changing” ideas. Winners will be announced on May 16th and the winning projects implemented between 5/16/11 and 12/31/11.

We are looking for projects that will significantly impact literacy in their communities.  It’s why we refer to them as “Game Changing” ideas.  Successful applicants will use funds to advance a compelling literacy project that Better World Books will follow and share with you.

If you work at a library, know of anyone that works at a library, love your library or have ever been touched by the power of a book, check out www.betterworldbooks.com/librarygrants.  There you’ll find out more about the library grant program and how to participate.

Here’s one from Jozi Hall, National Account Manager

Day One
I spent the week volunteering at the Manzanita Schools with Eddie Porello, our Performance Marketing Specialist, Emily Kirkpatrick, Vice President for the National Center for Family Literacy, David Murphy, our CEO, and Kathleen Stacey from the University of Hawaii Hilo Library, one of our librarian trip winners. We got to work with students at both of the schools at Manzanita: the Manzanita Community School and Manzanita SEED, a two way immersion program in Spanish and English. Sam Davis, the adult-class teacher and our gracious host, created an ambitious schedule for us that including everything from refinishing benches to helping second graders with their model volcano science project and helping language-learner parents create new projects.

We attended an orientation session to learn more about the community and the work of  Oakland Adult and Career Education. My favorite part of the orientation was our Polish lesson, which gave us an idea of what it is like for the adult language learners we would be working with. It takes a lot of courage and concentration to learn another language as an adult.

We finished the day with a lovely dinner at Bistro Boudin at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf . Our dinner hostess, Michelle East-Krull, is a University of San Francisco Student and we were happy to learn that she is a customer and fan of Better World Books!

Worldfund’s mission is to raise the quality and relevance of education in Latin America—the key to transforming lives and breaking the cycle of poverty. They do this through scholarship funding and through teacher and principal training programs. There is an excellent introductory video about Worldfund on their website.

Photo: Michelle Viegas, Director of Programs & Strategic Outreach, and Erin Sawaya, Vice President of Development and Communications, speak to Better World Books employees.

Presentations from our partners always have loads of great information, but there’s usually a key fact or two that jump out for me. In this case it was that $600 can provide a scholarship to a child for a full year (in case you’re interested here’s a link to the donations page).

Photo: Rosa Valdez, a Book Scanner at Better World Books’ Mishawaka location, discusses literacy in Latin America with Erin Sawaya of Worldfund.

Worldfund currently impacts 86,000 students annually, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela. Their goal is to reach 250,000 Latin American students annually by 2015.

Photo: Bill Hajicek, Better World Books Quality Assurance, in discussion with Michelle Viegas of Worldfund.

In addition to Worldfund visiting us, we had the chance to visit some of the Worldfund beneficiaries in Brazil back in 2008.   What a great experience.  Don’t miss the blogs about the Starfish School and Women and Education in Brazil.  Here are some fun photos from that trip:

Photo: Above – Jesse Ault, head of Customer Care for BWB, builds a bookshelf at the Starfish School. Right – the completed bookshelf.
Photo: “Book Getter” Aaron King has a little fun with the kids at the Starfish School.	Photo: BWB Founder Xavier Helgesen learns from students at the Starfish School.

Those of us who can read and write sometimes take that ability for granted, but think of all the things you couldn’t do without those skills, from navigating your way in a new area to knowing what medication to take to being able to understand and communicate with the world around you.

Being literate is not just about the ability to read a story and enjoy good books, it is about being empowered.  United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said it best:  “Literacy is not just about reading and writing; it is about respect, opportunity and development”.

There is a correlation between literacy and poverty. This is why empowerment through literacy is so important. Literacy presents new opportunities and brings the marginalized onto equal footing enabling them to lift themselves out of poverty. Literacy is foundational to education which in turn is foundational to development.

To celebrate International Literacy Day, we’re discounting all used books in our warehouse 15%.  As always, you’ll be helping one of our amazing non-profit literacy partners with every purchase.   (Note — that means used books from our warehouse, not from the Marketplace.)

Just use this code at checkout:    4LITERACY
One Day Only – Good on Sept. 8, 2009!

Everyone is doing their part, be it lighting the Space Needle in Seattle in honor of Project (RED) or donating a few cents from each delicious warm beverage, and Better World Books is no different.  A woman who is literate in Africa is twice as likely to avoid AIDS. So when you see that we’ve shipped over 1,000,000 books to Africa and are the primary source of funding for Books for Africa, you know that we’re not just talking about reading great books, we’re talking about changing lives.

Tell a friend about World AIDS Day, because the disease may be getting less press, but it’s no less pressing.

In any event, the article is sharp and can be found here but the point of most note is the end:

Those concerned about the compression of our sped-up language are directed to “Linguistic Ruin? LOL! Instant Messaging and Teen Language,” by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis, an article in the spring 2008 quarterly “American Speech” (dukeupress.edu). My choice for most influential and seminal language book of the year is “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World,” by Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in D.C. (Oxford University Press, $30). She’s a scholar who can write in real time with real words.

(Question: Which part is more embarrassing: the views represented, the fantastic irony, or the circled dots above the “i’s” that suggest this was actually done by his kid?  ¿Donde esta la educación, amigo?  I sort of love the superfluous hyphen though…)

Maura Varian, Acquisitions Support Manager, hatched a brilliant plan earlier this year. One day, she thought, “Hey, we collect books. We sell books. And, most of us even read books. So, why don’t we help people learn to do what we love most?” And, today, that plan is a step closer to fruition.

As of last week, 11 Better World Books employees have graduated from our local literacy council’s tutor training program. The employee-tutors will be utilizing the company’s new volunteerism benefit for this program. In essence, they’ll be compensated for their time as if they were working away in our distribution center. For Better World Books, providing direct service — be it tutoring, painting houses, or playing with children with disabilities — is just as valuable as receiving, scanning, and shipping books. In the end, it’s all about creating a Better World.

And, Maura’s not done there. In an article which was released today by the South Bend Tribune, she is ready to take her dream of local literacy even further, saying I’d “like to see the partnership grow to eventually allow the company’s own employees who have issues with literacy to get the help they need from the Literacy Council while they’re on the job.”

Thanks, Maura, we’re right there with you!

For the full article, click here.

StoryTubes is here! From New York to California, kids in Grades 1-6 are talking up their favorite books. You can too!

Along with your parent or guardian, follow these simple steps:

–Make a 2-minute video about your favorite book;
–Upload the video to YouTube; and
–Come to this StoryTubes website and send in the link to your uploaded YouTube video using the online Contest Entry Form.

>Voting mania will then begin and happen each week in May! At the end of each week, one lucky contestant will win $500 in books. Their sponsoring organization (school, library or designated organization for home-schooled youth) will receive $1,000 in books.

Four Video Categories:

Hair-Raising Tales
From or For the Heart
Of Heroes and Heroines
Facts, Fads and Phenoms

Tell the story about your favorite book today. When entering, please don’t use your last name in the video. Entries will be evaluated on creativity, content and performance.

OK kids and parents, “let’s see the videotape!”

…the new education-advocacy group Common Core posed these and 30 similar questions about history and literature to 1,200 17-year-old high-school students (below on the following four pages), it discovered that American teenagers are “stunningly ignorant.”Common Core puts some of the blame on six years of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law, which forced schools to concentrate lessons on standardized-test measures for math and reading at the expense of education in the humanities. The organization debuted on Feb. 26 with a press conference that unveiled the findings in a glossy pamphlet titled Still at Risk, an allusion to the landmark 1983 education survey, A Nation At Risk. That earlier survey famously stated, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Apparently, we lost.

The test posed a series of questions whose answers even the slowest-witted high-schoolers might reasonably be expected to know. But only one question (Who gave the “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963?, Page 3), yielded the correct response on a near-unanimous basis (97 percent). Only 61 percent knew what the Renaissance was (Page 2), and only half knew why the Federalist papers were written (Page 3). Fewer than half knew when the Civil War was fought (see below). And this test was multiple-choice!

(Full story and full test over here)

“The city of Fresno is always proud to support family literacy,” said Deputy Mayor Jeff Eben. “We are excited to have won the ‘Great American Word Challenge’ and thank all Fresno’s residents who participated so successfully in this fun and creative Challenge.”

The Great American Word Challenge proved which American cities could walk the walk AND talk the talk:

What is a literate adult?  In the world of literacy statistics we hear tons of information thrown around about “proficient” abilities, “basic” abilities, etc… but what does it really mean to be proficient or basic as far as these tests?

Over at Educational Cyber Playground they did some research to figure out what exactly was going on.  In order to do this they went to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy at the National Center for Education Statistics. What they found was more interesting…

If you’re willing to use some simplifications, we can break down some pretty fascinating information here.  I’ll let them tell the story:

”
World IQ averages about 90, so the 50th percentile for Americans (IQ 100) is the 75th percentile for the world.

FIRST QUESTION:
Find which energy source will supply more power in 2000 than it did in 1971, using this table.

Source: US Department of Interior United States Energy Through the Year 2000
BTU: Quanity of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.

SCORE:
Now if you said nuclear power, you figured out what 46% of adult Americans can’t (and 71% of adults on this planet cannot either.)

THIRD QUESTION:
Use the article to write a sentence that explains why the investigating committee thinks these practices are dangerous.

Panel: Sloppy work perils nuke plants
By THOMAS O’TOOLE
Washington Post

WASHINGTON–After investigating corruption in two of the nation’s largest construction unions, the Senate Labor Committee charged Wednesday that so many incompetent welders and engineering technicians are helping build nuclear power plants it constitutes a national safety hazard.
“Unqualified workers have been routinely referred for work as skilled craftsmen, working qualification tests have been circumvented and favoritism is rampant in choosing who will work,” according to a 72-page report released by the majority staff of the Senate Labor Committee.
The committee spent two years investigating the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and one year investigating the International Union of Operating Engineers.
The report concluded that “new legislation to certify workers and make test cheating and extortion a federal crime is needed to ensure the safety, proficiency and durability of . . . construction sites.”
The committee said that one of the most serious practices it uncovered is the sale of union cards for as much as $1,600 to welders who never took qualifying tests.
The committee also charged that experienced welders routinely took tests for inexperienced welders, who were then put to work on jobs that included the Three Mile Island and Beaver Valley nuclear plants in Pennsylvania and the Perry, Ohio, plan near Cleveland.
The committee said that one witness testified that “60 percent of the welders he worked with on the [TMI] fuel pool [where spent radioactive uranium was kept under water] were not qualified for the union journeyman books they held and had bought their books right on the job.”
Another witness said that “some of the worst work I’ve ever seen” was done at the TMI fuel pool. The witness said “incompetent welders” made up to 25 or 30 bad welds in the pipe used to carry radioactive fuel, the report said. The witness added that the welders covered mistakes by “washing the bad welds down with a torch to make them all look uniform.”

SCORE:
This is a much tougher exercise. Only 20% of American (6% of world) adults could write the required one sentence. This corresponds to an IQ of 113. “

Imagine for a second the ramifications of this.  We want our kids to be successful and we want our educational system to be excellent by world standards (the best, really) but only 20% of the respondents could even execute simple reading comprehension from a newspaper article(!)  Not just any article either, one that would directly affect how you vote and what you support for the future of our country.  The most important thing in a democracy and civilization is literacy because information is the key.  Meanwhile there’s only 20% of adults with adequate reading comprehension in our own country.

I’m more thankful for the NCFL’s efforts everyday…

The White House wants to eliminate spending for more than a dozen education programs, including Even Start, which promotes family literacy; grants to the states for classroom technology; Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants, for needy undergraduates; and a scholarship program named for the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia.

But Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, said Friday that the president would request $1 billion for the Reading First program, to teach poor children to read by the third grade. Congress cut the program to $393 million this year after federal investigators found conflicts of interest, cronyism and bias in the awarding of grants.

Ms. Spellings said she hoped lawmakers would “see the error of their ways.”

Obviously it’s hard to complain about $1 billion for the Reading First program, so kudos for that, White House (I still find this to be a strange–if effective– apostrophe/synecdoche) but eliminating spending for Even Start and grants for undergrads is a lamentable decision, at best.

In reference to this demographic, Richard Riley, former Secretary of Education (1993-2001) in the US commented in his March of 2000 speech, “54 percent of all teachers have limited English proficient (LEP) students in their classrooms, yet only one-fifth of teachers feel very prepared to serve them.”

In response to this state of affairs, the NCFL, our partner in US literacy, sponsors hundreds of programs all around the US and they have never been more important than today.  You don’t have to become a teacher to help the situation, check out the NCFL’s website for ideas.  Their latest approach offers “five $600,000 educational grants to benefit hispanic and other immigrant families for literacy efforts.”  It’s not just Johnny who can’t read.

Today on The Friday Flyer, Wendy Mass, author of “A Mango-Shaped Space” and “Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life,” has given some tips on providing your children with good books that they’ll enjoy!

1. If you don’t have much time to search, look for books with award stickers on them. Dedicated committees of librarians spend a lot of time selecting the cream of the crop so you don’t have to.

2. Pass along the books that you loved growing up. These are very often still in print, and often with updated covers. This is also a great way to bring you and your young reader closer.

3. Don’t pass over classics like The Cat in the Hat and Charlotte’s Web. Just because you’ve seen them your whole life, doesn’t mean a child has.

4. Describe your young reader’s interests, hobbies, and reading level to a children’s librarian or bookseller, and ask for appropriate recommendations.

I only highlighted 4 of the 8 and it was awfully difficult to choose, so check her recommendations for yourself at the site.

Over at GeekSugar, the femme hip/intelligentsia mashup site, they have some interesting information about literacy.  First of all they have the following:

The Education Department is blaming the country’s increasingly poor spelling and writing skills in youth on their love of text messaging. In a recent report on the national test results in English for about 37,000 students aged 15 and 16, the department’s Examination Commission said cutting-edge communications technology has “encouraged poor literacy and a blunt, choppy style at odds with academic rigor.”

Regardless of whether or not you’re buying into that as legitimate, GeekSugar links to The Great American Word Challenge.  The game involves filling in the missing letter of the word, as defined.  Why would you engage in such a thing?  Well…

The city that achieves the highest-cumulative average score takes the title and the prize of a Ubisoft donation of My Word Coach video games and Nintendo DS systems to local NCFL learning centers. Even better, everyone who takes the challenge will be entered to win a trip for two to Washington, DC, and have the chance to win one of two Wiis.

Ah!  The plot thickens!  So support the NCFL as Nintendo battles illiteracy in the USA (seriously).  If that doesn’t feel right for you, you could always go to FreeRice (as previously reported).

They could be scared of a plummeting book sales, but my bet is that they and many others are scared of a world where kids aren’t well educated enough to read and savor Roald Dahl. Seriously, childhood without Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Witches can barely be called childhood.

And before anyone even suggests it, the movies do the books no justice. Grab a cup of cocoa, snuggle up with your favorite Dahl book, and relive your childhood this weekend. I know how to recognize a witch, do you??

Original article

(looking for some Dahl for Christmas?)

From Left to right pictured are Rod Risley (Executive Director of Phi Theta Kappa), Xavier Helgesen (one of the co-founders of Better World Books), Al Gore (former Vice President of the United States), Aaron King (Director of the Campus Division for Better World Books, and the guy writing this post), and David Murphy (CEO of Better World Books).

Now I know because I am standing behind Mr. Gore, I look like I was photoshopped into this photo.. but trust me, I was there, it is just a trick of the light. If this were a court of law, I would say “look, you can see the shadow from his shoulder on my suit jacket, I really was there!”

So, I would love to say that Al Gore, while contemplating his next initiative to help the environment, heard the news that Better World Books and Phi Theta Kappa were teaming up to run book drives on college campuses around the country, keeping books out of landfills, providing funding for Phi Theta Kappa chapters, and most importantly, raising money for literacy programs.

When Al Gore heard of this wonderful partnership, he immediately arranged a meeting with us to encourage us in our good work, and then took a photo with us.

Unfortunately, the above tale would be a fabrication;  yes, we do have a great partnership with Phi Theta Kappa, and yes we have saved millions of books from landfills, and raised a lot of money for Phi Theta Kappa and literacy too.. but Al Gore did not set up any meeting with us.

Mr. Gore was gracious enough to be one of the speakers at the Phi Theta Kappa conference in Nashville in April 2007, and there was a Photo Session Scheduled where a select group of conference attendees got to stand in line and cycle through for a Photo Op with Mr. Gore.   We had about 15 seconds to say hi and tell him about our program, but lets be honest, Mr. Gore met thousands of people that day… so lets just say I am not expecting any invites to his house for coffee anytime soon.

While we were waiting for our 15 seconds with Mr. Gore, we a got a chance to meet Kevin Sharp, country music star, cancer survivor, and inspirational speaker, another one of the presenters at the conference.  He had hosted his own photo op the previous day, and now got to experience the other side, waiting in line just behind us for the chance to meet Al Gore.

So let me close by saying: Mr. Gore, it was very nice to meet you, I won’t be offended if you don’t remember me, and thanks again for inventing the internet, allowing me to post articles like this.

I hope that Better World Books can continue to work with Phi Theta Kappa and all of our amazing partners to someday save enough books from landfills and raise enough money for literacy that Mr. Gore features us as a great way to help improve the world in whatever his next project is.

I just read about this amazing concept: Getting laptops for everyone in the world! They designed a new robust amazing laptop, made it cheap, made it fun… and i wont try to do it justice here, check it out: http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/explore.php

For a limited time, you can “give one, get one”, buy one of these bad boys for yourself and send one to a child in need. and, it is tax deductible! Load it up!

I just did it, I feel great about it, and I can’t wait to get my new toy….

Also, you get a free T-mobile wi-fi access for a year… wow, this thing is practically free!

[Ed: check out the news about the recent spat with Intel and other things at One Laptop Per Child News]

According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.2 million people living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. During 2007 some 2.5 million people became newly infected with the virus. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 and are killed by AIDS before they are 35.

Around 95% of people with HIV/AIDS live in developing nations. But HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world.

Started on 1st December 1988, World AIDS Day is not just about raising money, but also about increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.

[...] The 2007 theme, “leadership”, highlights the need for innovation, vision and perseverance in the face of the AIDS challenge. The campaign calls on all sectors of society such as families, communities and civil society organizations – rather than just governments – to take the initiative and provide leadership on AIDS.

There you go, click the link and find out how to help.

You may be saying “I understand why you bring in environmental issues on the blog, Better World Books has a triple bottom line that emphasizes environmental impact, but why a focus on AIDS today?” (although you’re likely not using these exact words…)

Well, reader, note the following:
”Recognizing that poverty, underdevelopment and illiteracy are among the principal contributing reasons to the spread of HIV/AIDS…”

(Para 11, United Nations General Assembly (UNGASS)
Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS 2001)

Now you get it, right? Our work everyday with literacy partners Worldfund, Books for Africa, Room to Read and The National Center for Family Literacy is all about getting books and education to the people that most need them. In this way we make our effort to battle poverty, underdevelopment and illiteracy, the very things that the UN has identified as the “principal contributing reasons to the spread of HIV.”

We don’t just talk a big game folks, we walk it. So get out there, tell a friend, spread the word, start a book drive, or buy a book, but make sure to do something to live out the tenet that “we must be the change we wish to see in the world.” -Ghandi

“Education is key to an effective response to HIV/AIDS. Studies show that educated women are more likely to know how to prevent HIV infection, to delay sexual activity and to take measures to protect themselves.”

Moreover, educated girls can transform an entire community. Go to the following link http://www.unfpa.org/hiv/women/report/chapter5.html to find out how educated women can empower themselves and others.

Additionally, this graph shows the stark difference between the prevalence of HIV/AIDS infection among Ugandan girls who are educated and those who are not.

Source: De Walque and J Whitworth, MRC Uganda (2002)

]]> http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2007/05/25/the-impact-of-educating-girls/feed/ 0 http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2007/03/20/introducing-jack-hanlon/ http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2007/03/20/introducing-jack-hanlon/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:02:18 +0000 Jack http://www.betterworldblog.com/PermaLink,guid,4c93dfd2-99a5-4308-8a2c-cfd979d7d020.aspx Hi, I’m Jack, the new Northeast Regional Director here at BWB. If you want some info about me, check out our “About our regional directors” page on the site. Done yet…? OK, now that you know everything about me, I can begin:

It’s hard to start anew. I just moved to Boston and started a new job and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I like the area I moved in to and I like the mission of Better World Books, but how will I adapt? Will the people in each area live up to the fantastic experiences I’ve had in the past? Today I can say: Yes, and then some.

I’ve only been with BWB for a month, but from meeting the amazing people at the warehouse, talking to Pat at Books for Africa on a conference call, to even joining an “office” March Madness pool (which I am getting beaten soundly in, by the way), I feel at home already. The first people I met working here were so diverse in background and outlook, but there is one goal that we share: global literacy. This experience has truly made me feel like this is a job that I can, and will, succeed at because of their support system and enthusiasm. I can name at least 10 people who have saved me already, and I’m sure that list will extend, and hopefully, with our new hires I can start building a reputation as an answer guy too.

The best thing about starting though was the crop of emails from book drives encouraging me and showing such excitement about our program. Gary Chang, a Phi Theta Kappa member in New York City sent me the attached photo of how many books he has in his room at the beginning of the semester. You all know how much a picture is worth so I keep this one above my desk, with my eye on the prize.

Mandy Zatynski , The Desert Sun , November 23, 2006

Parents don’t need a book to teach their children to read or learn the English language.

They only need the time, patience and willingness to talk to their children – about anything.

That’s the message Linda Arias, a certified trainer for the National Center for Family Literacy, hopes to send through weekly McDonald’s Mealtime Literacy Nights.

“The whole part of this is learning literacy is fun,” Arias said.

She is one of the trainers who coordinates McDonald’s pilot program in Palm Springs, the only one of six locations in Riverside County . The others are dispersed throughout Southern California .

The McDonald’s Operators Association of Southern California decided to team up with the National Center for Family Literacy after the center’s 2005 study showed that four out of five third-graders in California read below their grade level.

The study also reported that 26 percent of children live in households with guardians who did not graduate from high school.

At Tuesday night’s session, Arias encouraged parents to tell stories of every kind – about their own childhood, their family and their child as a baby.

“There’s fun ways to tell stories to your family,” she said. A Spanish interpreter followed her lecture and instructions, as most of the participating families are Spanish-speaking.

Parents then practiced storytelling with their children.

“Do you know something that’s funny about you?” Martha Escobar asked her son and nephew.

“Since you were born, you’ve never stopped fighting,” she said, and the boys laughed.

Escobar, who brings her two sons, a nephew and niece, said the sessions have inspired her to do more at home.

” Sometimes at home… you don’t take the time to do something so simple. Seeing their faces – how they have enjoyed it – gets me going to make a little more time at home,” she said.

Palm Springs Unified School District parents involved in the Even Start Program, a federal program for low-income families, have been invited to the 90-minute sessions for five weeks.

At each session, Arias reads books with the families, provides books and instructions for activities to do at home and teaches them how to make literacy a daily part of their lives – simply by reading street signs as they drive by or counting money in a grocery checkout line.

The sessions took place at McDonald’s, 1717 Vista Chino in Palm Springs.

Tuesday’s session was the last, but McDonald’s plans to expand the program in early 2007.

This past Thursday, my role in Better World Books really hit it home for me that I am really, really lucky. I’m more than well-fed, I’ve got a college degree under my belt, and I have access to health care: a trifecta of good fortune.

Normally, I think about such achievements as the product of hard work and intellect, not the environment of opportunities I was born into. “Gee, I’m really glad that I wasn’t surrounded by violence, famine, and an AIDS crisis when I was a kid,” is usually not my first thought about how my life’s events have unfolded. Living in the United States, it’s easy to forget how lucky I’ve been, since most of the time I interact with people who are equally fortunate.

Considering the relationship between poverty, war, disease and illiteracy, it’s a no-brainer that education must be improved for children who aren’t as lucky as myself, here in the U.S. and worldwide.

Like I said, I’m not one for sentimentality, but I’m really grateful that Better World Books has engaged so many people in this mission of literacy  — and I’m grateful that our BWB partners (including students, professors, librarians and bookstore managers) take part in this mission year-round, not just on a turkey-filled holiday.

For student organizations, spearheading a drive is not only a meaningful service project, but also a successful fundraiser, as well as a great way to generate some buzz and raise your profile on campus, which can lead to a greater recruitment turn out.

For bookstores, supporting a drive drives foot traffic to your store, and does wonders in terms of generating goodwill toward your store – particularly during buy-back, when it’s needed most. Many stores are taking the positive PR one step further, by providing bookstore scholarships or making donations to local charities with funds provided by BWB.

But in many cases, there are far greater – yet harder to measure – implications to coordinating a book drive. For example, many of the 900+ BWB book drives that took place last Spring were coordinated by Alternative Breaks groups. Alternative Breaks is an amazing organization that provides students with the opportunity to engage in week-long, intensive service-learning projects over Winter and/or Spring Break, as opposed to hitting the beach for a week of debauchery.

These groups often use the funding they’ve generated through their campus book drive to subsidize the expense of sending large groups of students to a distant locale for a week of service. Speaking from experience (I participated in 3 Alternative Breaks as an undergrad), I can tell you that some of the students who participate in these trips will have the most profound, defining experiences of their lives. Some of these students will be so deeply moved that they will alter their course of study and their chosen career paths. Some of them will choose a life of service as a direct result of having participated in an Alternative Break. Indeed, most of the choices I’ve made in my own professional life can be traced back to my first Alternative Break in 1997, when I traveled from Kalamazoo, Michigan to Atlanta, Georgia to work with the city’s homeless population.

So please, dig deeper. Look beyond the most obvious and immediate benefits of coordinating (or simply supporting) a campus book drive. There is such great potential in cultivating a civically engaged student body. One act – be it donating a book, coordinating a drive, or supporting a student organization that is – can set off a chain reaction that will dramatically affect the lives of far more people than you’ll ever know. Pay it forward.

35 House seats, 33 Senate seats, governorships in 36 states, not to mention thousands of state legislative and other local races. There are also other ballot initiatives in 37 states, where voters have the opportunity to voice their opinions on such issues as the minimum wage, or stem cell research.

So obviously there is a reason to get out the vote!

You see, I believe this is a travesty that so many of those who have the right to vote are not taking advantage of this opportunity to have their voice be heard.  I know you care because you are here visiting our site.  Better World Books is engaged in a socially responsible business effort to improve the literacy rate in the US and around the world.  More importantly perhaps, Better World Books seeks to empower college students who care about this issue, and give them the opportunity to make a difference.   Illiteracy is a woman’s issue, it is a poverty issue, a hunger issue, a social justice issue, etc.  Whatever your cause, wherever lies your passion, illiteracy almost definitely has an impact on that issue.

So what does your vote have to do with that?  This is an important time in US History because our nation is arguably still the single most powerful and influential country in the world, and has the capability of making a huge dent in the lives of the hundreds of millions of illiterate individuals around the world.
What this means is your vote, is more then just casting a ballot for your local races, it has an impact which resounds far beyond your hometown communities or your state, because it has an international influence.  You have a responsibility to show your support for the candidates that reflect your convictions, and who are going to best represent you and your passions.

Go tell your friends, your family, your neighbors, whomever.  Tell everyone you know to go vote.  Voting is power. 

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.

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!

“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.

]]> http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2006/10/09/literacy-in-the-context-of-survival/feed/ 0 http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2006/09/29/1554/ http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2006/09/29/1554/#comments Fri, 29 Sep 2006 19:27:56 +0000 Mary http://www.betterworldblog.com/PermaLink,guid,d9e29878-33b8-485b-919e-d308d9a8f832.aspx 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!

Terrorism, genocide, and undisclosed nuclear weapons programs definitely indicate a bleak and frightening future unless we find some solutions – and find them fast – so I can’t say I blame the UN for the current discussions. When 200,000 people have been killed, and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes into refugee camps in Darfur, it’s not surprising that fighting poverty, establishing basic health care, building infrastructure, or developing education is taking a backseat.

As I was reading about it all in the paper, part of me feared that these horrible crises might never come to an end. I mentioned before that the link of illiteracy to poverty, disease, and violence cannot be ignored. Of course, the UN and developed countries provide a great deal of aid to fight poverty, which I’m not discounting, but perhaps we need more groups that are specifically focused on literacy.  There is a frightening percentage of the world’s population that can’t read (20% — that’s one in five people).

Without access to quality education, democracy cannot function and intolerance cannot be overcome.  It may be a bold statement to say that literacy will prevent genocide, but I definitely believe it. As governments need to put out fires around the world, perhaps we need more groups like Books for Africa, Room to Read, NCFL, and Worldfund to help prevent fires in the first place.

I backpacked throughout the former communist bloc of Central and East Europe in the mid-1990s. Particularly in rural Romania, the landscapes were dotted with subsistence farmers, and horse drawn carriages far outnumbered cars. Foreign influence was difficult to find from what I saw, and I remember seeing only one “Western” business (McDonald’s, of course) in the downtown district of a mid-sized city. Although official numbers indicate high literacy rates in Romania, the economic despair of the countryside meant the lack of opportunity written as anguish on the people’s faces. People of the same age as I, with the bulk of their lives ahead of them to establish self-worth and enjoy personal achievement, faced an immediate future of high unemployment, poor infrastructure, corruption, and limited access to resources enjoyed by highly-industrialized countries.

If “the West” brings its educational resources to a country in which they previously did not exist, a footprint is forever left on that culture. Whatever your opinion of these effects may be, they snowball in an influence to be felt for centuries. Contemporary German, for example, is loaded with technical terms and colloquialisms imported from America. Assuming the anecdotal story I heard is accurate, contemporary English is approximately 40% French in origin, all of this as the result of a relatively short Norman occupation. Imported culture may not only influence language, but with the deepest personal values of a people. Asian youth are repeatedly accused of rejecting traditionalism in favor of “Western” ideals. One may argue that a culture takes millennia to develop, but is irrevocably changed the second it comes in contact with foreign influence. But who is to say these transformations should be considered negative? Are they infections or simply a dialogue with other world cultures?

When returning to rural Romania again several years later, I noticed the economic progress the country had made in the short time I was away. More cars filled the streets, shops slowly filled empty historic districts, and tractors worked a few fields. I was surprised by the considerable progress that had been made. Yet I overheard several other tourists commenting about how sad it was that rural Romania was modernizing, and that they were not having the kind of authentic Old World experience they had years before. I listened to them with disgust for their selfishness. As I have discussed with a few individuals from Better World Books before, I wonder how people can be so self-centered as to say to a people, “Stay in the past so we can have a more enjoyable vacation.”

Importing literacy and education does not mean the death of a culture, but rather the birth of a Culture of Literacy, one that embraces the future while honoring the past. Respecting a culture does not mean resisting progress and rejecting a higher standard of living; respecting a culture involves documenting it as best as we can in its full integrity and vigor, while marrying indigenous traditions and values within the scope of a more capable culture progressing with the rest of the world. Literacy gives individuals the tools to record their own history, experience new ones, and join the world on its march towards an ever-increasingly higher standard of living. It’s astonishingly selfish to curse anyone to forever sweat with hand tools while sitting in an air-conditioned rail car bound for a 4-star hotel.

MESSAGE ON INTERNATIONAL LITERACY DAY
8 September 2006

Literacy sustains development. That is the theme of this year’s International
Literacy Day. It recognizes that higher literacy rates are essential to economic growth,
poverty eradication, social participation and environmental protection. It reminds us that
literacy is the platform for developing a society’s human resources.

Literacy begins with primary education, and achieving universal primary schooling
by 2015 is one of the Millennium Development Goals. Yet primary education does not
reach every child; there are more than 100 million girls and boys who never enrol in
school. Even for those who are enrolled, the quality of primary schooling may be so poor
that it leads to only a fragile command of basic literacy skills. And while official statistics
put the number of illiterate adults at more than 770 million, that figure does not include
the millions more who are ill-equipped to deal with everyday needs of learning,
understanding and communicating.

Clearly, in many parts of the world, development has not yet delivered one of its
most important outcomes — more literate and better educated populations. At the same
time, those societies are being robbed of the crucial tool for development which literacy
represents — a tool that enables people to take advantage of new learning opportunities,
respond to changing occupational demands, undertake greater responsibilities, build their
way out of poverty and protect themselves against disease — especially HIV/AIDS.
Women and girls who are deprived of literacy lack a vital weapon in freeing themselves
from inequality and discrimination. As we are reminded by the overall theme of the
United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012), literacy is freedom.

The precious gift of literacy can sustain development only if it is itself sustained –
by post-literacy programmes, further opportunities for education and training, and the
creation of “literate environments” in which literacy can thrive. On this International
Literacy Day, let us pledge to step up national and international efforts for improved
literacy levels worldwide. Let us give literacy a real chance to transform individuals and
societies around the world.

Kofi A. Annan

BWB’s CEO David Murphy addressed the 600+ Honors Delegation, his speech emphasizing the important of service and literacy.  He highlighted his recent experiences in Africa and demonstrated how running a book drive makes a tremendous impact.

Over 85 Golden Key chapters worked with BWB in ’05-06.  We’ll be announcing chapter scholarship winners shortly.  Here’s a photo of ’04-05 scholarship winner Anandi, from Hunter College, and myself (former employee Fritz Gheen) during the conference.