Hi! I’m Sahana Srikanth, an 11th Grade Youth Council Member from Ohio. 

I serve as the Executive Director of Young Learners Foundation, a youth-led organization dedicated to providing children with essential literacy resources for free. Young Learners Foundation just concluded the first session of our National Book Drive Initiative, and we wanted to share a few insights into our process conducting a book drive from start to finish. 

We’re always looking for more youth to get involved, so if leading a project like this sounds interesting to you, please fill out the form here and we will get back to you about initiating a Book Drive.

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Step 1:  Reach out to educators in your local district to inquire about hosting a Book Drive. Start with your former English teachers and ask for their perspective on having a Book Drive held within the school. Once you have four to five teachers on board, make sure your school’s administration approves of the project. We contacted our local Middle Schools and a few former teachers who were interested in helping us coordinate this project.

 

Step 2: Create flyers with information about the book donation period, types of books to donate, incentives for donating, and the organization that will receive the book. It’s important to create an engaging flyer that motivates people to donate! Place these flyers in the school hallway and classrooms, where youth will see it and remember to bring in books.

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Step 3: Purchase 10 - 12 boxes (12 x 12 x 12 inches recommended) to place in the aforementioned classrooms. If you, educators, or students you know have extra Amazon boxes or cardboard boxes being unused at home, these can be leveraged to collect books as well. 

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Step 4: Periodically check in on the book collections to ensure they are making progress. If needed, you can incentivize youth to donate by rewarding the winning classroom with doughnuts or pizza!

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Step 5: Once the collection period is over, set up a time with the educators who hosted, to collect the boxes and sort the books. You can even work with some students after school to quality-check books for stains and tears, organize books by size and grade level, and repackage books into shipment-ready cardboard boxes.

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Step 6: When your boxes are all ready to go, prepare to donate to your recipient location. We had planned our book recipients a few weeks before starting the book drive, so we would recommend doing the same. You can look online for youth-serving institutions to donate to nationwide, or support local Title 1 Schools who may have a need for children’s books. We specifically focused our campaign on donating to locations with low rates of book access or high rates of illiteracy, to ensure our contribution made a tangible difference on the lives of youth.

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Step 7:  Ship your boxes via USPS (if Domestic, use MediaMail for cheaper shipping) to the Recipient Location! Make sure to have the correct information on packing labels before you send the boxes off. Double check that everything is taped and packaged well to avoid books falling out while in transit. If your Recipient is nearby (a school, for example) please ensure to communicate a time with administration at the organization to drop off the book boxes.

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Step 8:  Once the shipments are made, reach out to each of the Recipient organizations to confirm that they received the books from your work. If you can, ask them for pictures of youth using your books to document the impact your book drive is having on the community.

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Congratulations - you have just completed a Book Drive from start to finish. Make sure to send a thank you note to anyone who donated to your campaign, and celebrate with volunteers who helped you package and sort the books. Great work!