Books for Keeps

📣 Sponsors Needed! 📣

Help keep the Community Book Fair free for all readers by partnering with Books for Keeps this year as an event sponsor. We ❤ our sponsors and celebrate you throughout the event and beyond! Being a Book Fair Sponsor is such a great way to make an impact in your community! Interested? Email [email protected], click the link in our bio, or visit our website for more information!

We are standing with our neighbors, colleagues, and friends in Barrow County this week. We are heartbroken for the Apalachee High School community. It's too much. Thank you, Barrow County teachers and school staff for everything that you do for kids, every single day. We are so grateful for you.

For families with younger kiddos, we've included some book recommendations that can help talk about and process traumatic events like these (thank you, & others for sharing these titles!) ➡ For more resources, we'll keep reposting from our local partners in our stories.

We are ready for you, Literacy Mentors! ⭐ On Monday, The Storytellers Literacy Mentor Program officially kicks off for the 2025-25 school year. We cannot wait to welcome you back into our amazing schools (and see who will get to read Elephant and who will be reading Piggie 🐘🐷📚). See you soon!

THANK YOU Burn Boot Camp Athens for hosting a and collecting over 1400 books!! ❤📚 Last week, you filled Rainey & Andy's cars with your donations, and all of these books will be shared across our community. Thank you for supporting literacy for all!!
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Interested in hosting a BFK Book Drive? We'd love to partner with you! Learn more on our website or click the link in our bio. 📚📦

THANK YOU! ❤📚

We kicked off this summer with a big goal of refilling our shelves with 15,000 books to be shared with kiddos this school year. We invited y'all to donate books (or $ to purchase books), host book drives, and volunteer in our warehouse. And together, we refilled the shelves with 21,200 books!!! WOW!

Your generosity will inspire joyful experiences with literacy for kids of all ages and help expand book access for families across our community. We are so grateful for your support. Thank you! ❤❤❤

Learn more about Refill the Shelves 2024 and your impact on our website (or check your inbox if you subscribe to our newsletter!)

Pulled out a few of these today just because. ❤📚

Thank you for making it possible for us to read cards like these from students all across our community. This work would not be possible without each one of you!

Literacy Mentor Training is underway, y'all! 🤓📚

We are so excited to welcome mentors into our partner schools in just a few short weeks. We'd love for you to join us! As a Literacy Mentor, you can make a difference in a child's life in just an hour a week. We'll match you with an elementary student that you'll get to meet weekly during the school year and provide all the training, support, and materials needed. It's so much fun! Learn more and apply at the link in our bio.

So many chapter books! 😍📚

We are continuing to prep for the 5th Annual Community Book Fair and are feeling really grateful for all of our partners who have donated books, been a book drop location, or hosted a book drive. Your donations will make their way into classroom libraries, onto home bookshelves, and across our community. Interested in hosting a book drive or donating books ahead of CBF 2024? Visit our website to learn more!

We still have ~30 students waiting to be matched with a mentor for the 2024-25 school year! ⏰📚 You can make a difference in a child's life by volunteering for just one hour a week at from September-April at one of our partner schools. It's so fun, y'all! All books, activities, and training are provided, as well as on-site support from our Storytellers staff at every mentoring session. No prior mentor experience required! We'd love to partner with you this year. Learn more and apply at the link in our bio!

📣 We've got some news! 📣 Please join us in welcoming BFK's new Executive Director, Ruthi Hortsch!

Ruthi joins us after over a decade in education and youth development. She's a Michigan-native, a numbers person, and of course, a self-proclaimed bookworm who is passionate about creating joyful experiences with literacy that can be forever associated with learning. We are thrilled to welcome her to the Books for Keeps team and are excited to follow her lead into this next chapter of our story as an organization. Friends, help us give her a warm BFK welcome this week! ❤📚

You can get to know Ruthi more at the link in our bio (or if you subscribe to our newsletter, check your inbox! 📩)

A huge shoutout to our friends at Timothy Road Elementary for the HUGE donation of children's books!! 🤩📚 Thanks to you, Rainey & Andy filled up two whole car loads of books that we'll be able to share across our community this fall at the Community Book Fair (join us in October!) Book donations like these make it possible for us to expand book acess, together. Thank you!

If you have books you'd like to donate or are interested in hosting a book drive, click the link in our bio or checkout our website to learn more!

Happy first day of school, y'all! Students, teachers, and school staff across our community here in Athens-Clarke County are returning to the classroom today. We are wishing you all a day filled with fun reunions, smooth getting-to-know-you games, and on-time everything. 😅❤ We love this community and are excited for a great school year ahead!

We had such a great time last week with the BFK Bookmobile at the Empower Pinewoods Family Expo event! (So much so that we only took one quick photo once we got there! 😃🚍📚) Thank you so much to the Library and Learning Center for hosting this event and for providing us with the opportunity to connect with our community. Such a great way to welcome the 2024-25 school year!

Thank you, Athens Area Community Foundation, for naming Books for Keeps as one of the "Non-Profits to Know" here in Athens, GA! ⭐📚 We loved getting to celebrate your incredible 15 years of service to the community earlier this summer and are so, so grateful for your continued partnership and investment in supporting literacy for all. Thank you!

Wait wait, HOW many books did students and mentors read together this school year?! ⭐📚➡ 2023-24 was such an awesome year for the Storytellers Literacy Mentor Program! We're excited to share program results with you and celebrate the great work of students and mentors, starting with this bookish program snapshot!
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Interested in being a Storytellers Mentor this school year? Applications are open! Mentor training kicks off NEXT WEEK and will be offered throughout the month of August ahead of our September program kickoff. Complete your application at the link in our bio to get started!

We can't believe that it's the last full week of summer break here in Athens, GA! ☀📚 As we count down to the first day of school (yay!), we'll be sending off the season with some staff summer reading spotlights. Follow along to hear about what our BFK staff has been reading this summer!

Here we go, y'all! 📚📣 We are less than 100 days away from the 5th Annual Books for Keeps Community Book Fair! Mark your calendars and join us at the BFK Warehouse for the first 3 weekends in October. ➡️ Every day, every visitor can take home up to 100 FREE books for keeps! Visitors will have the opportunity to browse thousands of donated books for readers of all ages. Stay tuned for more information about the event throughout this fall. We can't wait to see you there!

Can't believe it's already July, y'all! Our team has been hard at work alongside our amazing volunteers this summer taking stock of inventory in the BFK Warehouse and preparing to share even more books with our community next school year. We'll be taking a few days off this week to catch our breath, spend time with friends and family, and of COURSE do some summer reading! See y'all next week. ❤📚📦

Please join us in giving the warmest welcome to our newest team member, Laura Griner! Laura joined the BFK team this month as an In-School Coordinator for our Storytellers Literacy Mentor Program. She'll be supporting students and mentors all year long! ⭐

You can look for her at our Storytellers School Sites when we kick the year off later this fall or check out her bio on our Team Page to get to know her a little bit more. We're thrilled to have you, Laura - welcome to BFK!

We were honored to attend Area Community Foundation's 15th Anniversary Brunch Bash as one of Athens' Top 10 Nonprofits of the Year! What a gift to get to support literacy for all within a community that's so committed to supporting each other. ❤ We're grateful for everything that y'all are doing! Here's to another 15 years!

Y'all what a weekend! We loved getting to be a part of Music & Arts Festival in partnership with Athfest Educates and visiting with so many of you. ❤ Not to mention, we gave away almost 800 books through the BFK Bookmobile!!! We really never get tired of seeing readers of all ages find books that they're excited about. We saw kiddos taking home books about everything from pandas to aviation, and grown-ups grabbing such a wide variety of titles too!

It's always a joy to get to spend another Saturday in Athens with you. Happy summer reading, everyone! ❤ 📚☀️

The countdown is on for AthFest 2024! 📚🎸🚍 Books for Keeps will be there in the KidFest area on Saturday, June 22nd in our big blue Bookmobile! We'll have shelves filled with FREE books for readers of all ages + a few other fun goodies. Every visitor will have a chance to climb aboard or browse our shelves to take home up to 2 free books per person. Come say hi and grab a book or two, we'd love to see you! ❤

Interested in volunteering with us that day? Sign up, it'll be so fun! Link for volunteers in bio & shared to our stories. See you Saturday!

❤📦 Operations Team Appreciation Post! ❤📦 Destini and Andy are the incredible BFK team members behind every single one of our book distribution events. They manage our BFK Warehouse, incoming book inventory, book drives and donations, communications with school partners, volunteer experiences, and so much more. Y'all are amazing, and we are so grateful for you!

Thank you! ❤📚➡

⭐️ WOW! ⭐️ We wrapped up Spring Book Distributions a few weeks ago, and the numbers are officially in! Thanks to this community, 6,287 elementary students took home 75,444 books for keeps this spring!!

With the help of over 700 volunteers, Books for Keeps visited 18 elementary schools and every child at every school had the opportunity to attend a book-fair style event in their media center, browse a selection of hundreds of brand new books, and select up to 12 free books to take home and keep forever. ❤📚 None of these events would be possible without the support of our incredible community, and we've got some people to thank!

❤ THANK YOU to our amazing school partners including principals, media specialists, and teachers who helped ensure that every kiddo had the opportunity to fill up a big ol' tote bag of books to take home. We are so grateful for all that you do for kids and for literacy!

❤ THANK YOU to our incredible volunteers who have been helping us prep for these events in the BFK Warehouse since January! You helped sort books into categories that kids would be excited about, pack them into boxes to deliver to school sites, AND met us at schools across our community to help every child find that just-right book.

❤ THANK YOU to our community of donors whose gifts throughout the year make it possible for us to purchase enough books for every child and ensure we have titles that kiddos are going to be excited to see each year. (And another special thanks to those who have hosted new-book book drives or donated books from our wish lists - we saw kids take them home this spring and it was magical!)

And lastly, thank you to the students who make these events so joyful. We love getting to see you find books you're excited to read, to hear about the books your taking home to share with your brothers and sisters, to write down your suggestions for next year's book inventory. Y'all are amazing, and we can't wait to see you next year! ❤📚❤

🌟Applications for Literacy Mentors are LIVE!🌟
The link to apply is in our bio and on our website. Share along with anyone who might be interested. We would love to have you!