Books for Keeps blog

Our friend and colleague Katie Johnson, a teacher with the Cedar Shoals Freshman Transition Camp, needs books!

If you have any gently used copies of these books to donate, you can drop them off a Cedar Shoals High School or mail them, ATTN: Katie Johnson. The address is: 1300 Cedar Shoals Dr, Athens, GA 30605. Thanks for your help reaching these students with thought-provoking, high-interest books as they make their move to high school – from Books for Keeps, from Cedar Shoals, and from the students!

Here is the list of what is needed:
Yummy by G. Neri
Playground by 50 Cent
Fist Stick Knife Gun (the graphic novel version) by Geoffrey Canada
Love Don’t Live Here No More: Doggy Tales Vol 1 by Snoop Dogg
Hey Ya; The Unauthorized Biography of Outcast by Chris Nickson
Forged by Fire by Sharon Draper
The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexis
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Also needed by in smaller quantities:
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez

In summer 2016, Cedar Shoals hosted this summer program to help students transition into high school. Part of this program was handing out lexile-level-appropriate books to students entering 9th grade at feeder middle schools, Hilsman and Coile. Before camp began, students had to read their assigned book. Once at camp, students were organized into groups by what book they were assigned to read, and [...]

It’s been a remarkable year for Books for Keeps – we added our second employee, two-and-a-half years after BFK Executive Director was first hired in 2013. We added a new school, our first since 2014, and are deep into preparations to add four new schools in 2017.

We’re so not done growing.

Books for Keeps is excited to announce the addition of two part-time positions, to begin work in early 2017. These positions, an administrative assistant and a communications manager, could be combined into a single position depending on an individual’s resume and experience.

Check out the administrative assistant job description here and the communications manager job description here.

These positions will help Books for Keeps scale up, get stronger and smarter with the use of the executive director’s and program manager’s time, and enable us to start reaching 14 new schools over the next three years. Have questions? Just email Leslie directly: leslie@booksforkeeps.org.

Oh, and here are a few numbers from 2016:

Last week was a big one for us.

Part of a strategic plan in the works for over a year – we finally got to announce a major commitment to expand Books for Keeps into 14 additional elementary schools across Georgia over the next three years.

That commitment, formally announced at at meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in Atlanta, allowed us to reprise an appearance at the CGI America meeting made by Melaney Smith, the Books for Keeps founder, in 2011. Oh, how we’ve grown since then! We nearly tripled our program, hired two full-time employees, and grew outside our little home community of Athens. We were honored that Melaney was invited back to present our commitment on stage during Day 2 of the CGI meeting, while Executive Director Leslie Hale represented Books for Keeps during the full two-day event.

Officially, finally, we could say it: by 2019, Books for Keeps will be serving 11,000 children annually all over Georgia – including every child attending a Clarke County elementary school. Five of those schools will be in Atlanta, and another three in rural Georgia counties, starting with Elberton. That’s 140,000 books given away annually.

While last week was big – appearing on a big stage, making a major announcement – much of the work lies ahead. We will triple our program reach over the next three years. That means going out and getting the community buy-in – from EVERY corner of the community – necessary to serve 7,000 new students at 14 new schools.

Can we do it? We sure can – but only with the help of people like you. Make a donation, make an introduction, sign up for our newsletter – or just spread the word.

Want to help, [...]

It’s that time of year when our hearts swell. It’s like Christmas, and we get to feel like Santa Claus, giving more than 45,000 books away to children all over Athens, Atlanta, and Warrenton.

Join us as we help children select and count their books and record their feedback on our book selection. This is the ultimate volunteer experience! Share in the joy of a Books for Keeps distribution by signing up to volunteer with us.

No special skills are required; training is provided in the first 10 minutes of each shift – so the most important requirement is to show up on time! Sign up for a shift via Community Connection at this link.

If you are part of a group that would like to adopt an entire shift (8 to 12 volunteers), please email Rachel Watkins to sign up: rachel@booksforkeeps.org. Available shifts will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. There is limited space in each shift, so please don’t delay!

*****

FOWLER DRIVE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, ATHENS, GA
[Thursday, April 28, 2016: 7:55 a.m.-11:10 a.m. SHIFT FULL and 11:10 a.m.-2:10 p.m. BOTH SHIFTS FULL]
Friday, April 29, 2016: 7:45 a.m.-11:10 a.m. 

DOWNTOWN ACADEMY, ATHENS, GA
[Friday, April 29, 2016: 12:45 p.m.-2:30 p.m. SHIFT FULL]

GAINES ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, ATHENS, GA
[Monday, May 2, 2016: 7:55 a.m.-11:40 a.m. and  12:15 p.m.-1:45 p.m. BOTH SHIFTS FULL]
[Tuesday, May 3, 2016: 8:15 a.m.-11:45 a.m. SHIFT FULL] and 11:50 a.m.-1:50 p.m. 

M.E. FREEMAN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, WARRENTON, GA
Wednesday, May 4, 2016: 7:55 a.m.-10:35 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.

BARNETT SHOALS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, ATHENS, GA
Thursday, May 5, 2016: [7:45 a.m.-10:30 a.m. SHIFT FULL] and 10:25 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
Friday, May 6, 2016: 8:05 a.m.-12:25 p.m. [and 12:25 p.m.-2:15 p.m. SHIFT FULL]

J.J. HARRIS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, ATHENS, GA
Monday, May 9, 2016: 8:45 a.m.-11:25 a.m. [and 11:30 a.m.-2:45 [...]

A guest post by Books for Keeps Board Treasurer Joe Hill

I remember when I first learned to love to read.  My father was stationed at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, NC, and I was at Tabernacle Middle School in English class with our teacher Mrs. Hellmer.  There we learned to diagram sentences and if we could, we used all the adjectives in our spelling list to make unnecessarily long sentences which we would then have to diagram.  Mrs. Hellmer had a bookshelf full of fiction representing every genre and she would ask us to choose a book for recreational reading or a book report.  We had a library I suspect, but I don’t recall going there in middle school.  All I remember was her bookshelf and how because of it I discovered that reading was something that could be fun.

When it came time to choose my first book in middle school English, I remember thinking a book cover with dragons looked pretty cool.  So I started with Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern.  I started with Dragonflight, then Dragonquest, The White Dragon, Dragonsong, Dragondrums and pored through most all of her Pern-based books.  My school was a little way out in Maysville and the bus ride with all the stops was at least a half hour. The long ride to school and home provided ample time to knock out a couple chapters.  I became a voracious reader in middle school due to the long bus ride and my access to that bookshelf.

These were the days of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers, where every mall had at least one bookstore.  Both the comic shop and the bookstores were within bike-riding distance for me.  After a slice of [...]