One Million Gently-used Kid Books Project
Since 2010, the Behavioral Health Team at the St. Clair County Head Start program has been collecting donations of gently-used book for children (ages 5 years-old and younger). Recently, we’ve had enough to give all 1500 children in the program one book, but we’d like to give them a lot more each year. We’ve set a goal of raising one million books and giving them all to children in local Head Start programs and other agencies that serve children. If you’d like to donate gently-used books for infants, toddlers, or preschoolers, you can mail them to:
OMG Kid Books Project
c/o Stephen Hupp
Alumni Hall, Box 1121
Edwardsville, IL 62026-1121
Along with the books, we send the following note home to parents:
Read every day with your child (starting from birth)
(this is the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics)
Read as part of the bedtime routine
(this is a great way to help make sure that daily reading happens)
Ask questions about letters and words while reading
(this increases how quickly children learn to read1)
Examples:
- “Can you show me where to start reading on this page?”
- “What do you think the animal is saying here?”
- “What letter is this?”
- “Can you find a really long word on this page?”
Read Indeed (nonprofit literacy organization)
We recently learned of a teenager that started a similar project before us. Her nonprofit organization has already collected more than a million books! While our two projects are not connected to each other, we thought it was only fair to point out this young trailblazer. Here’s a little information from her organization’s website: “Read Indeed’s mission is to promote literacy by collecting and gifting books to at-risk children. Maria began Read Indeed when she was 8 years old and her original goal was to collect and distribute 1 million books to kids in need by the time she’s 18. She accomplished this goal before the age of 13! Now she wants to work toward 2 million books while distributing books to all 50 states in the U.S. and every country in the world. Having donated more than $4 million in books, Maria has touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.” If you’d like to help Maria reach her goal of 2 million books, you can learn more at this website: www.readindeed.org

Mail your gently used books here:
OMG Kid Books Project
c/o Stephen Hupp
Alumni Hall, Box 1121
Edwardsville, IL 62026-1121