Book Donations

Late 2009- Early 2010

This past November we got a call from Wanda Fisher in the Borders midwest office offering us the proceeds of a book drive that Borders was holding at 21 stores in the Chicagoland area. At each of these stores, anyone buying anything was asked if they wanted to add to their bill and buy a book for a child. 40, 174 people agreed to do this, and we spent a large portion of December traveling around to all of these stores picking up large boxes of great new books (about 600 boxes) Thank you Amy, Will (and Will’s iPhone GPS) and Jeff from our board who helped out with the pickups!

In December, with the help of our book finding partner Linda Weigl, we were offered 87,499 from ABDO Publishing in the Minneapolis area. We called our trusty rock and roll trucking company Upstaging, and they dispatched 2 trucks to the frozen north, and two days later, ERC Delivery was filled with almost 125,000 books!!

On the first two Saturdays of January, our sorting teams went into action.

First week sorting team:

Barry O’Connell, Deb Seitz, Will Fletcher, Lisa Simon Cohen, Sue Stone, Kelly Christopher, Meghan Boyer, Marlene Feibel, Amy Kaplan, Jennifer Jensen and Shelli Rosenfeld.

Second week sorting team:

Shelli Rosenfeld, Deb Seitz, Liz Moore, Susan Mackesey (and her two kids), Melissa Wood, Clay Perschall, Jennifer Peterson, Andrew Smith, Sue Stone, Carroll O’Connell, Meri LeBlanc and Tracy Barrientos.

Made up of our board members and volunteers, they open and sorted about 500 boxes of books, with the help of pizza and donuts, and reboxed everything into categories!

In between the two sorting sessions, Tom from ERC organized and counted the ABDO donation.

Starting on Monday, January 11th, we are sending out lists of all of these books to our contacts in the teaching community, and the fun begins!!

Early 2009

In February we received a donation of 143,000 books from Heinemann-Raintree. After sorting them, we have started to distribute them to the Chicagoland area. As of April 6th, we have distributed about 40,000 books to 15 different schools and organizations.

Here is a sampling of the procedings:

On May 1st, board members Jeff Peterson and Paul Natkin journeyed to the Talcott Fine Arts and Museum Academy to help distribute their shipment of books. Jeff interviewed some of the students (check out his blog entry)

and the students enjoyed the books! They immediatly sat down in the hall and started reading! Thanks to the work of Literacy Coach Margaret McGregor and Principal Craig Benes.

Schiller School. Junior board member Jason Mount and Paul Natkin helped distribute about 1000 books to the students of Schiller School with the help of Debbie Shepard of the Chicago Sinai Congregation.

During that same week, Cathy Clark at the John L. Marsh Elementary School distributed about 800 books that we delivered to her.

On Thursday, April 2nd, 4th grade teacher Sue Stone and Principal Victor Iturraide passed out books to many of the students at The Chicago Academy. Each student got to take two books home with them that day.