Smut for schools! Won't anyone think of the children?

[resonant]

Early Sunday morning, while the building was empty, a fire started in the kidlet's elementary school. They think it was caused by a mouse chewing on the wiring. Thank God, no one was hurt, but there's $800,000 worth of damage; every room in the building suffered smoke and/or water damage.

This is a struggling public school with an awful lot of low-income and low-education families. Just last year they were forced to spend a bunch of money on safety-related parking-lot redesigns, and they were just at the point where their fund-raising could go for things more directly related to education when this happened.

What do they need? Books. The kidlet's fourth-grade teacher lost a thousand books. The library sustained heavy water and smoke damage. I don't know how many of the books will survive.

They're looking for gently used children's books (grades pre-K through 5) and for gift certificates to help them replace books and other things.

There are a lot of worthy causes looking for money just now, but if this particular reading-related worthy cause tugs at your heartstrings the way it does at mine, here's my offer:

Donate either books or gift certificates (see below for how). Ask me a question regarding one or more of the characters I write. I'll write you a snippet, or possibly more if inspiration strikes.



If you ask a smutty question, you're likely to get a smutty answer. If you ask a non-smutty question -- well, remember who you're talking to, here.

How to donate:

If you have books you want to donate, e-mail me (resonant8•sbcglobal•net) and I'll give you my address.

If you want to donate gift certificates (they're asking for Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Target, Office Max, or Office Depot), e-mail me and I'll give you the e-mail address to send the notification to.

Which characters I'll write:

Anyone from the fandoms I've written is a pretty safe bet. Likewise anyone from any of the books I've reviewed on Goodreads. Others ... well, ask me.

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Where is the information about how to donate the books? We have some duplicates at home, and we do get some children's books at work as well. Is there a list of titles they actually want?

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Durrrrrr.... you edited the post while I was commenting. NEVERMIND.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Tried to close an html tag with a parenthesis. Doesn't work so good.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh, and -- they're just saying new or gently used, grades pre-K through 5.

[http://users.livejournal.com/tesserae_/]

Have you looked into Donors Choose (http://www.donorschoose.org/homepage/main.html)? I bet one of the teachers or the librarian could write up a grant...

ETA: duh. However, I will amend that to ask what grades specifically they need books for?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Kidlet's in fourth, but the school as a whole serves pre-K through 5.

[an-sceal.livejournal.com]

I'm going to ask my wife, the teacher, to ask around at school. I think she might be able to get a box or two.

I'm so sorry for the school!

Have they considered contacting Borders/BN/Amazon directly? If nothing else, Amazon is pretty good about setting up fundraising wishlists, and there's always a possibility that they might match donations or something.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

That's a great idea -- I'll bring it up at next week's PTO meeting.

[100wordspermin.livejournal.com]

I think I have a few likely candidates, especially since my mom is a school librarian. Will email you for details.

[florahart]

I sent email, but subject line may be unobvious. :)

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

In case you don't check LJ messenger, I just saw this post on LJ friends-of-friends and sent you a message about an organization that might be in your area that can help.

(just didn't want to post a public comment because it's a bit more real life details than I like to get in this journal)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Thanks -- I'm bringing it up at the next PTO meeting (I missed one, and the next one was canceled due to the damned ice storm) -- appreciate your help1

[temaris.livejournal.com]

A couple of my local schools set up wishlists on Amazon, and then asked people (parents and volunteers) to have a look and maybe buy something (or several somethings). That way the donor felt they were giving actual books, and the school got what they wanted rather than fifteen copies of one book and nothing of anything else *g*. And if the donor wanted it got delivered direct of course.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

This is a great idea, and I've passed it along to the librarian. I don't think she's done anything about it yet, though -- I imagine it's an overwhelming amount of work. A bunch of people have donated books, and now I wonder who they've got to do the work of cataloging them?

[temaris.livejournal.com]

Ouch, yes -- that was how I got involved at one of the schools, actually -- the library team at work (we're a law firm) donated two days of work, and seven or eight people went in (not all library staff!), painted, built bookcases, sorted books into broad categories, and typed them up into an Excel spreadsheet.

If we did it again, I'd urge the school to use Librarything. The big advantage to mostly new book stock is they almost entirely have barcodes, and if you have a barcode, you only need a couple of fifteen dollar scanners and a matching number of wireless notebooks to let Librarything's hooks to other library and online bookstores do the work. The joy of Librarything is the effort of inputting is tiny, kids or anyone can do it, and it's perfectly easy to output the entire account as a tab delimited file or excel spreadsheet, choosing what fields to take -- such as title, author, keywords, LC classification number. If they have a library catalogue, it should be possible to import a delimited file into it, though depending on the system it may require some work. And if they don't have one, then they could use the Excel spreadsheet instead.

[whatifisaidno.livejournal.com]

Yay, smut. I emailed you.

[sciwitch.livejournal.com]

American Mensa started a program, Project Inkslinger, that tries to help in exactly this type of situation. You may want to have your school check them out:
http://www.us.mensa.org/Content/AML/NavigationMenu/Programs/CommunityService/ProjectInkslinger/ProjectInkslinger.htm

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I passed this information on to the librarian -- thanks! Don't know whether she'll be using it or not, but at least she knows it's out there.

[wychwood]

I don't know if you've encountered Bookmooch, but they have a function for charities which I think would cover this situation - people donate mooch points, and then you can mooch books from the site for free. I also don't know what the selection of children's books for the age-range is like, but... *is basically unhelpful but optimistic?*

[indywind]

I'm on bookmooch--same username--and I'd gladly donate points or request titles for you.
Their selection is eclectic, like a used book store on crack; they might have 12 copies of something, and none at all of something else, no way to tell til you look.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Likewise. I have points to spare on BM and would be happy to donate.

[treetelling.livejournal.com]

Also on bookmooch, would also donate points or request titles.

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

alsoalso on Bookmooch and have scads of points that I'd be happy to donate.

[chickwriter.livejournal.com]

Res, that totally sucks. :(

I'll e-you so I can donate a gift cert.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's awful! I'd donate a barrow-load of my old ones, but of course transatlantic shipping puts the nix on that plan.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would be a kind of expensive box of used paperbacks, wouldn't it?

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

I'll donate a gift card for amazon -- I have some old books but I'd like to hang on to them for my own kids if I ever have one, and it's probably more useful for the school to get what it wants than to just get what I happen to have.