Book Hubs
Providing an Abundance of Books Wherever Families Are
Book Harvest Book Hubs, including Book Boxes and community bookshelves, are filled with dozens of new and gently used, culturally inclusive children’s books, ensuring that children and families have reliable, steady access to high-quality books to harvest and keep.
Book Boxes
Book Harvest's Book Boxes are colorful, outdoor book hubs placed in community settings that families frequent. In close collaboration with community partners, Book Boxes are installed in front of child care centers, public parks and recreation centers, faith communities, social service agencies, health clinics and schools.
They are filled with dozens of books in English and Spanish for children of all ages; engaging titles that children and families can choose to take home and build their own home libraries.
Book Harvest team members and volunteers design, construct, and install easily recognized Book Boxes in partnership with local community organizations and businesses. These colorful book hubs provide children and families with an abundance of free books in the places they go in their everyday lives.
Questions? Contact Associate Director of Community Engagement, Caitlyn Bergmann, at caitlyn@bookharvest.org.
Community Bookshelves
Since its origins in 2011, Book Harvest has forged partnerships with businesses and organizations to accomplish an audacious goal: to remove ALL obstacles to literacy for children in our midst, beginning in the ordinary and informal settings that characterize our neighborhoods and starting with families as soon as their children are born.
Community bookshelves are possible thanks to a collaborative network of volunteers and community organizations that ensures all children have easy access to their very own age-appropriate, culturally diverse books so they can build their own home libraries.
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How Community Bookshelves Work
Book Harvest provides the bookshelf and culturally-inclusive books. Partner organizations agree to do the following:
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Keep the shelf neat, tidy, and fully-stocked with books and ensuring visibility of Book Harvest signage.
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Ensure that every book provided by Book Harvest is taken home by children and families and not sold, traded, bartered, used for fundraising, or given to staff or other agencies.
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Allow children and families to select their own books without any requirement to pay for them or return them.
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Maintain regular contact with Book Harvest staff and notify them of any changes in our organization's mission, location, or population served.
You can complete the form to find out how to partner with Book Harvest and provide books for your specific community. Please note that partner requests can take 1-2 weeks to process, and submitting the form does not guarantee that we will be able to approve the request.
If you have questions, please contact Associate Director of Community Engagement, Caitlyn Bergman at caitlyn@bookharvest.org.
Why Book Boxes and Shelves Matter
Our goal is to provide more children with the opportunities to build home libraries – an essential foundation for language and literacy development.
• Access to free books is essential to close the equity gap for people living in poverty. [1]
• A network of community partners/partnerships results in enhanced family engagement. [2]
• When families have easy access to books, they develop reading routines at home. [3]
Find a Book Box or Bookshelf
Sort by category to see select locations.
Thank you to our Book Box funders: City of Durham, Duke Energy Foundation, JES Avanti Foundation, The Jandy Ammons Foundation, United Therapeutics