November 4, 2021
Book Harvest values feedback from all of our constituents – families, youth, schools, partners, volunteers, and donors. We collect feedback a variety of ways throughout the year, including our two annual community events.
At our Block Party in July, we asked attendees to participate in a survey. A total of 68 people completed the survey (thank you!) and the results are below.
What We’re Celebrating:
Showing Respect
We love to hear that most participants feel like they are treated with respect by Book Harvest staff .
Meeting Needs
We are grateful to be meeting the needs of the community. We will continue to do so to the best of our ability!
Accessibility of Services
Most of the responses indicate that families feel it is easy to get services at Book Harvest. That’s great! And we’re working to make it even easier.
Summer Event Benefit
Our summer Block Party proved to be a worthwhile educational opportunity for youth.
Feedback We Heard:
Cultural Inclusivity
There is far to go but it is good to see that more and more families are seeing books that reflect their families and cultures.
Book Harvest’s “book access” team has been working on more stringent curation of our donated books and providing more inclusive purchased books. Plus, every month we feature five children’s books — called our Featured Five — that are at the top of our donation list. These are all included on our Regulator Bookshop and Amazon wish lists. These lists have not only helped bring awareness to culturally inclusive books, but also increased the number of inclusive books that we are able to provide for our families.
Learning Support
Storytimes and more access to free books are the top two requests.
We look forward to the decline of COVID-19 and have incredible plans for 2022, when we hope community storytimes will return in abundance.
We are also excited to continue installing Book Boxes throughout Durham, ultimately covering the city in bright orange and green boxes filled with free children’s books.
We are grateful to the community members who participated in both this survey and our January 2021 survey (results from that survey are here). We want to make sure that we’re hearing from all of our community members and will be surveying event goers again at Dream Big 2022, so please consider adding your opinion if you join us there.