We don’t have an actual program for when we give books away, but we like to share where our books have gone!

When we receive gently used book donations, we look for opportunities to get these in the hands of kids.

2021:

• A foster home in Springfield, Illinois is receiving books from our gently loved book collection thanks to a connection who works there. This is in addition to the journals we sent that are used during therapy with the children.
• A third grade classroom in West Virginia was sent gently used and new books after we heard the new teacher inherited a classroom library with torn covers, torn pages, and other obstacles. We’re hoping your new books will be loved again by this classroom!
• Boxes of books were sent to West Des Moines, Iowa where we connected with a school librarian interested in spreading some book love to teachers and children in her school!
• Nine children, between the ages of 5 to 15 in South Carolina, did not have books in their home. Thanks to a friend that contacted us about this, we found new homes for these gently loved books!
• Three new teachers in North Carolina received gently loved books for their classroom libraries. These teachers are in high poverty schools — and one had only been in her classroom for a week when she was offered some of these treasures!
• We sent some gently loved books to a nonprofit organization for teenage girls in the city of Chicago that were looking for a small group read. Thanks to our FREE BOOKS! message, we were able to supply them with multiple copies.
• A foster care coordinator in the counties west of St. Louis asks for donations on an unofficial page on Facebook. Our emails back and forth allowed us to send gently loved books to foster care children based on their ages, reading levels, etc. on multiple occasions!
• We sent gently loved books to Arizona for the children’s homes. Usually, the children at these group homes are part of the Barb’s Buddies program but Covid kept them at their facility. We were help them find new reading materials!
• After connecting with a friend of a friend on Facebook, we were able to share some of our donated books with a Senior Care Center in St. Louis! They updated us to share they’ve created a little library in March 2021 to share their books with others.
• When we receive autobiographies, biographies, military history, history, or something along these lines, we look to the men and women serving in our military to see if we can help. This year, we sent books to Camp Lejeune, Naval Support bases overseas, a battalion library in South Bend, Indiana, and more!

In August 2020, this took us to Michigan.

Miss Q will be using about 10 boxes of our gently used items to help her K-8 high poverty charter school students in Flint, Michigan. Books at her school are often old, have ripped covers, etc. and the teachers are predominantly funding these resources so we are excited to share our good fortunes with Miss Q and her school community. She is working to convert this van to a mobile library so students and their families can enjoy these books…and keep them! Check out the news story about her work!

In June 2020, new books were given to GirlForward in Chicago so each participant in their mentoring program could share the reading experience. These titles were chosen for their diversity, high interest for young adults, and those that would encourage great conversation. 35 sets of books were given!

Before COVID-19 shut down our ability to share gently used donations, we dropped off books at Chicago HOPES for Kids for K-2 students. Thanks to the wonderful work this organization does, these books will bring joy and literacy/academic support to students living in homeless shelters.

Some gently used books have been donated for our Book Sale and our Senior Program. Instead, we repurposed some of these to send to the troops overseas as well as their families at home or veterans.
In October 2020, our first two boxes headed to a base in Afghanistan and Kuwait. We are currently backing up more boxes to ship off to the families of troops in Tennessee so they can celebrate the winter season with a drive-by book event.
Since then, we have sent adult and children’s books several units overseas and to veterans here in the US.
We are currently looking for gently used books in the History, Military History, and Suspense/Thriller genres for adults.

In November 2019 and again in March 2020, we were able to share books with Dunbar Elementary School in St. Louis. Through a Facebook friend, we met Sam, who was putting together a free library for the students so they could take these treasures as their own. Many of our gently used books found new homes in Missouri!