Our Mission

Our mission is to provide quality literacy experiences for underserved students and communities. This work has several components:

We provide quality books to public school and community libraries where the majority of students live at or below the poverty line. Since 1999, with the help of volunteers, we’ve refurbished over 350 libraries and donated more than 2 million books.
We collaborate with partners to host fun, literacy experiences for families in communities throughout Los Angeles.
We bring beloved authors to schools.
With the help of volunteers, we provide bundles of high-interest books for students to take home.

Why iT matters

Few goals in education are as urgent as the effort to fix the deep, generational disparity in achievement between the haves and the have-nots in California schools.
For children living in poverty, the best predictor of reading achievement is the quality of their school library.
No matter where they live, all children deserve access to books and stories that will help them excel in the classroom.

For 30 years, California has remained last in the nation in school library funding.
School libraries in underserved neighborhoods in Los Angeles have been ravaged by years of neglect and lack of support at every level.

In addition to being covered with dozens of brightly colored murals, every school receives as many as 2,000 new hard-cover books for their library and 2,500 gently used titles for classroom use.
We support dedicated principals, library aides and communities with thoughtfully selected collections that include classic titles, culturally-relevant stories and popular book series!

Our small team relies on hundreds of volunteers.
The cost of a school library book can be as high as $35. Our program makes a difference because we secure new, hard-cover titles at a third of the cost.
90 cents of every dollar donated goes directly to the purchase of books and special programs.