Celebrating Book Harvest's Biggest Volunteer Year Yet

Smith's Nursery leads a wreath-making workshop at our holiday volunteer celebration.

Book Harvest isn't Book Harvest without our foundation of regular volunteers, and there's no better way to say thank you than a party! Last Friday, we celebrated their hard work this year at our annual holiday celebration and first-ever wreath-making workshop. Our regular volunteers show up on a weekly basis, processing books, refilling Book Hubs, and doing the hands-on work that brings book abundance to all corners of Durham and beyond.

We were delighted to welcome them into a very festive rendition of our volunteer space, crowded with freshly-cut greenery from Smith's Nursery in Benson, NC. Throughout the day, staff enjoyed the growing fir aroma as volunteers carefully trimmed and arranged sprigs, leaves, and berries onto their wreath frames.

The bagels and coffee in the adjacent room helped add to the celebration, and volunteers lingered past their wreath's completion to revel in the warm food and in the community they've built over a year of weekly volunteer hours.

Weekly volunteer Becky Fricke with her hand-made wreath!

"I've been volunteering at Book Harvest for five, almost six years," reflected Becky Fricke, a regular Book Harvest volunteer. "I come once a week, and it is such a happy place for me. I feel like it's really important that we all act locally doing good things as much as we can right now, and this is one of the really good things I think our community does."

Parker Nelson, our Volunteer Engagement Manager, highlighted that we've provided over 450,000 books to kids all across the state and country. “That's all due to the help of all of the volunteers,” he shared, “who are sorting, counting, processing, and inventorying thousands of books."

All of us here at Book Harvest are so grateful to the volunteers who are repeatedly willing to show up, support our work, and foster literacy and justice for all. With just a month left of the year, Book Harvest has recruited over 2x as many new volunteers in 2025 compared to 2024, growing our overall volunteer base from 535 to over 900 individuals. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has made this possible!

If you want to volunteer with us in the new year, visit our volunteer information page at https://www.bookharvest.org/volunteer-with-us. There are a lot of slots left to help out at our Dream Big Book Drive on January 19th, 2026, and we'd love to see you there!