Update: The library you helped build for the Buy India a Library project

I am very happy to provide new information about the library that you helped fund in Mysore, India.
Justin and Jan did a presentation about the project at Bibliotekartag 20012 in Hamburg, Germany Thursday 24 May at 12.30 PM – Here is a little more about what the focus of the presentation was: Why the story of Buy India a Library is (still) important

We have received a report on the status of the project and I am telling you this is AWESOME. I will hand the microphone to Florence form the organisation Good Gifts. Good Gifts are in charge of all the practical stuff.
/Jan

The Buy India a Library Project – The Library Itself

The Library funded by the Buy India a Library Project is being established in the Government Higher Primary School, in Gousiyanagare, Mysore district, Karnataka, southern India. The school has 820 pupils, from classes 1 to 10.

Our partner in Mysore has been working since 1984 for the development of people living in slums, street children and child labourers. It reaches out to 50,000 people in 56 slums and 20 villages in Mysore, Mandya and Chamrajnagar districts. Its aim is to empower the marginalised poor to live a dignified life through collective action for regaining human rights and building sustainable community development.

The library project took off from a humble beginning, procuring books and storing them in boxes in the absence of bookshelves. Books were also circulated among the poor people in slums, particularly to encourage parents to support their children’s reading. These modest steps were greeted with such enthusiasm that it was decided to expand the project to establish furnished libraries in government schools.

The libraries are open to all of the pupils in the school. Each library holds around 2000 books, both fiction and reference books to help with school work and for wider learning. Children can use the reading rooms, as well as borrowing books to take home. After a year, in which the school will be given advice and training in book keeping and record maintenance, the library will be handed over to the school, so that they can continue to run the library successfully themselves.

Background:
In India, people in the slums and villages have little opportunity for reading. Although there are public libraries in the district headquarters, these facilities are utilized by very few people, with only the highly educated or affluent class benefitting.

Most of the children in slums and villages go to government schools. In principle, most government schools do not have library facilities. An exclusive place meant for books, with furniture for children to sit and read, is a rare sight in these schools. Even in the classroom, books are few and far between, and huge classes make it even harder for pupils to get their hands on them. Most parents are illilerate, so there is often little support for reading habits at home. There is therefore an urgent need to renovate and modify classrooms to provide facilities for a library space.

Why Promote Reading Habits:
Reading is essential for children. It helps them develop initiative, originality and character, as well as providing varied entertainment and invaluable knowledge. Reading also opens up new possibilities and instills good values, laying the foundation for a better tomorrow.

Strategy for Sustainable Libraries:
The library project aims to address problems of lack of quality education in the government schools by developing reading habits among the children and thus widening their world of knowledge.

To ensure the libraries are embraced by both children and parents in the long run, the project focuses on:

• Building rapport with school children, teachers, community members and SDMC (School Development and Monitoring Committee) members.
• Forming library committees comprising eight members including children in each of the selected schools and equipping with the knowledge to manage a library.
• Selecting schools in slums and villages based on the criteria of need and situation analysis.

Each library will have an appointed coordinator who will monitor its function and ensure its proper use. They will also be responsible for organising various programmes to encourage the children’s reading habits.

#buyalib SHALL go to the ball!

Sorry we’ve taken so long to update this blog with a final total – we had one final donor to add to our total. That’s now all done, and the incredible news is between us we raised more than two-thousand, four-hundred pounds. More than enough to reach our target – getting on for twice as much, in fact!

That means, more libraries in Africa, and a bigger library in India. Amazing.

For more details, check out these Thank You slides.

 

Thank you very much for all your help! Libraries will now be built, where previously there were none. 🙂

What´s keeping us busy? Status £ 1920,82

Dear supporters

A very short update on what´s keeping the #buyalib team busy.

• We collected donations via a paypal account in the UK and one in USA. We are looking for cheapest way to transfer the US money to UK so we can get all the money to work for the library in India.
• We are working on how we get information from India through out the process to keep you informed about YOUR library via this blog.
• We are waiting on an answer that could give the project a last money boost – but nothing is sure yet.

Last: Let me tell you that out donation status is £ 1920,82 – which is awesome. Thank you once again for your contributions and interest in our project.

Who spends the money we’re raising, and how?

There has been a huge amount of interest in the Buy India a Library campaign, and so far you’ve raised £480 for the cause, from nothing. This is amazing! But we’ve got a long way to go, so please help us keep the momentum up if you can, by giving (donate button below), spreading the word via your own blogs or Twitter feeds, or both. We can see from when the donations come in that there is a direct correlation between people blogging about this, and people donating – if you write a post, you may just catalyse some charitable giving. 🙂

We want to provide some more detailed information about exactly what we’rre raising money for. People already know how we’re going to spend the money, but they want to know precisely who is spending it too. So, here’s some more info.

The company through which we are buying these libraries is UK-based, and called GoodGifts.org. This is an online catalogue filled with philanthropic gifts, and it has achieved a huge amount – over 100,000 gifts have been given via the charity. Just imagine, all of those could have been book tokens… Instead, the work GoodGifts have done has given 150 villages fresh water where they had none before, helped 150,000 orphans through dowries, and 4,000 children have been given the gift of sight having previously been blind!

It is the brain-child of the Charities Advisory Trust, a registered charity with more than  25 years of experience. What’s great about GoodGifts is that the money is guarenteed to be used for the specific purpose advertised – it doesn’t go into a general pot of cash, it is used specifically for what the customer chooses. So, via this campaign libraries will come into existence which were not in existence previously, thanks to your donation! GoodGifts charges a £4.95 handling fee on top of the cost of the gift – we (buyalib) will pay this fee, and the entirety of the money we raise will go directly to the charities involved.

Once we give the money to GoodGifts, specialist charities take over to administer the donation, and in this case literally build and kit out the libraries. The library in India will come from the Rural Literacy and Health Programme (RLHP), set up in 1984. To quote the organisation’s website, the RLHP “…operates in 56 slums and 25 villages in Mysore, Mandya & Chamarajanagar districts of Karnataka State in South India covering a population of 50,000.”

The donkey drawn libraries are delivered by the African Educational Trust a UK registered charity formed more than 50 years ago, dedicated to support education in Africa. The mobile libraries are aimed at kids, and contain around 100 fiction, non-fiction and reference books – the libraries travel to schools in Somalia, Sudan and Uganda (all of which are low on supplies of books, due to being former war zones).

We’ve added a FAQ page to this blog, which talks about these issues and many more relating to the #buyalib project. If you have any other questions we’d be happy to answer them!

In the meantime, if you can give any money at all, please use the Donate button below (the currency is £). Thank you very much.

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

The Video Guide to Buy India a Library

Do you want to know all about our project in less than two minutes? Watch this video where Andromeda Yelton shares the basic facts.

The video was recorded by American Libraries Magazine at the ALA Mid Winter meeting in San Diego, USA and published here.

Please help us by donating! The currency is in Pounds Sterling.

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

We’ve raised enough for two mobile libraries, in just 24hrs!

The Buy India a Library campaign kicked off yesterday, and thanks to incredibly generous support from across the world we already have more than three hundred pounds! Donations from Europe, Australia and the UK have come flooding in, meaning that within 24hrs of launch we had already recieved enough cash to buy two mobile libraries in Africa, and a Book Grant. This is absolutely amazing – thank you!

🙂

If you can help us get further towards are ultimate goals by dontating, that would be fantastic (note the amount is in the currency Sterling / Pounds) – we still have a long way to go to reach our goals.

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

Thank for any help you can give us! Whether it’s by donating using the button above, or just spreading the word about the campaign by any and all means (including tweeting a link to this post, or sharing it on Facebook – or just by telling your friends or sending an email to staff at your library) we are incredibly grateful – it’s amazing to think that where there was previously nothing, now there will be books and libraries – crowd sourced from librarians everywhere.

WOOT!

Subscribe to the blog for more updates on how we’re doing – and stay tuned for an in-depth look at exactly how and where the money is spent, and the organisations who are spending it.

Help us build and fund a library in India

This blog has been set up by four Information Professionals from the US and Europe, to buy India a library, via Good Gifts.org. (You can read more about who we are on the About page.) We’re launching a new year appeal to raise money enough to build and fund either a mobile library in Africa or permanent library in India, covering areas which are currently book-free zones. If you have any connection with libraries and spare any money at all, please donate whatever you want to via the PayPal button at the bottom of this post.

Depending on how much we raise, we will buy one or more of the following:

A donkey drawn mobile library…

Click the image to view the details on Goodgifts.org

A grant to buy books for a mobile library…

Click to view the original on GoodGifts.org

A full scale, permanent library, including staff, furniture, and books…

Click to view details on Goodgifts.org

How cool would it be to buy any of that stuff! None of us can easily cover those costs on our own, but together we can raise enough cash to make a huge difference, to a great library related cause.

The organization behind this is well known in the UK, and you can see exactly what it is we’re planning to buy, by clicking on any of the images above. We’ll gather all the money donated and when we have enough we fund as many books or libraries as we can.

Please help us reach our goal by donating (note the amount is in the currency Sterling / Pounds).

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

It goes without saying – although we will say it anyway! – that the paypal account we are using will ONLY be used for this project.

Please give whatever you are able, and please spread the word! You can use the share buttons at the bottom of the post to link to this post from Twitter, Facebook and so on – we are using the hashtag #buyalib. (If you’re on the homepage reading this, you may not be able to see the Share buttons – click here to go to this post specifically, where they will appear as if by magic…)

Thanks. Let’s do this!

– The Buy India A Library Team (Ned, Andromeda, Jan, and Justin)

History – Why we did this

It´s a short history:
Ned Potter & Jan Holmquist retweeted a link from @jaffne

– Andromeda Yelton came up with the idea of joining forces via twitter to collect enough money to make this happen.

Jan Holmquist set up this blog. Then we invited Justin Hoenke to join in because he’s such a great guy.

What to do now? Please make a donation:

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

See our launch post for more info on what we’re going to spend the money on. Thank you!