Invisible Children Wants Your Books

Today’s guest blogger Aaron King, one of our most amazing Better World Book Getters fills us in on the Invisible Children book drives and the impact your books are having in Northern Uganda.

Invisible children recently told me that we have 20 days left to “raise” 100,000 books.

And I was like, “What? You want me to hold a box of books up over my head”?

Ok, Ok… I understand the program: thousands of IC supporters across the country are feverishly collecting books which they ship to Better World Books’ warehouse where they are sold to generate funds to promote the peace process in Northern Uganda as well as rebuild and strengthen local schools.

And yes, whoever “raises” the most books wins a free trip to Uganda. But that is actually not important in the grand scheme of things. The real power of this program is the combined efforts of hundreds of book drives across the country.

So “raising books” is really just a fancy-I-really-want-to-be-hip way of saying “books collected are sold to raise money, raise awareness, promote peace, rebuild schools”. I get it. I just think it sounds silly.

But I’ll tell you what’s not silly: the impact that we can make if we actually hit the goal of this book drive: For every book “raised”, Invisible Children is able to fly a child to the moon.

That last sentence is totally false, I wrote it to see if you were paying attention. Seriously, though, the impact of your book drives are huge. To give you an idea of just how huge your raising is: (just nine boxes of accepted books raises enough money to for a year-long scholarship for a child in Northern Uganda. 9 boxes = 1 scholarship. 90 boxes = 10 scholarships. 900 boxes… That’s a big deal.

So maybe you gave up on the book drive because you were out of the running for the contest, or maybe you got worn out by last semester, or just maybe you didn’t have a clue what “raising” books meant. But now that you have read all this, you are out of excuses. Work hard this last 3 weeks to collect and ship lots of books. The goal is definitely achievable, and Invisible Children is counting on YOU!

–Aaron

Chase Bank is giving away $5 million to various charities through its Community Giving program and our partner Invisible Children is in the running.  Cast your vote AND help spread the word.