By Caitlyn Bergmann, Book Bank Manager
After over a year as part of the Book Harvest team, I already knew that our local community is incredibly generous. So I shouldn’t have been surprised at the response when we shared that we were ready to receive book donations again.
But WOW! We have an INCREDIBLY generous community!
It’s been almost two months since we were last able to receive book donations at our office in the Rockwood Shopping Center. In an average month, we receive at least 10,000 books, so that’s a lot of donations we’ve been missing. And as we have been finding new and innovative ways to keep the books flowing during this time when we’re all mostly staying at home — things like our partnerships with Durham FEAST and local laundromats — we were definitely ready for the donations to start rolling in again.
Given what I know about the generosity of our community, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what happened when we shared the news on Monday that our book donation bin was back.
In just 24 hours, nearly 5,000 people had seen our Facebook post, and 23 people and organizations had shared it. We were receiving comments and messages and calls from lots of people, all of whom were excited about the opportunity to share the books they’ve been saving for us in their homes over the past couple of months. And then the books started coming.
And coming. And COMING!
In just four days since we first shared the news that we were able to receive donations again, our bin has been continually overflowing. We haven’t even had a chance to count all the books, but we know for sure that at least 700 books have been donated already this week!
We are feeling the love from our incredibly generous community in a big way, and we couldn’t be more grateful. We are having so much FUN looking through all these new donations and dreaming of the children who will be adding them to their home libraries soon! Of course, we’re being cautious, quarantining all donations that come in for at least 72 hours, and limiting how they’re handled and by whom once we start preparing them to be shared. But most of all, we’re spending our days dreaming and scheming about all the innovative ways we can get these books back out of our office and into the homes of kids who will treasure them as much as their previous owners did!
THANK YOU, amazing Book Harvest family, for making my week such a delightful deluge of books! Thank you for your unflagging support and your eager partnership in our work. And thank you for your love for our kids and families, for your generous sharing, for your delight in gifting your favorite stories to our community.