Giving Tuesday: Spreading the Love of Reading
Giving Tuesday encourages a global day of charitable giving at the beginning of the holiday season. It’s a great way to focus on helping others, whether that be through your time, donations, goods or your voice!
At MarbleSpark, we are big believers in giving back and wanted to find a special way to celebrate this day.
What better way than to share our love of reading with others!
The Plan
Our goal was to leave copies of our kids poetry book, The Yeti in My Freezer, at places around our community. We routinely give this book away to deserving kids as part of our literacy mission, but we’ve never done so at random.
The books were placed in baggies with a sticker attached on the front explaining what we were doing. Since this was our first time and we had no idea how long it would take to deliver the books, we made 50 bags.
The Execution
Now the hard part. Where should we leave the books? We had some ideas, but nothing set in stone.
Omaha is a big place and we wanted to cover many areas. I mean if money was no object, we’d like to give EVERYONE a free book, but we aren’t there quite yet!
Our adventure took us to…
Metro Bus Stops
Libraries (on the windshields of cars in the parking lot)…
…and inside
The Salvation Army
Omaha Children’s Museum, a Coffee Shop and a Daycare
Children’s Hospital and Westroads Mall
The Experience
Four hours and many wrong turns later, we had delivered all the books and were hopeful they would be found, loved and shared.
We got a confirmation on our Facebook page later in the day from a happy mom who said, “Thank you so much!! We left the museum today and one was on our car!”
Mission accomplished.
Sharing our love of reading with the community was a joy and we hope to continue this new tradition next year!