#GivingTuesday

We’d appreciate your consideration.

This is #Giving Tuesday, the day after you’ve spent all your money on Black Friday, Small Business Saturday (what was Sunday?) and Cyber Monday– if you have any left, you’re encouraged to give it away.

We’d love to be considered for your end-of-the-year charitable donations. We are a 501c3 registered charity and your donations are 100% tax deductible.

This also seems to be the perfect time to talk about what we do at the Book Fair Foundation– and it’s not all about selling books.

When we talked about this at a board meeting last week, I drew a pie chart. (My 10th grade math teacher, Swabey Jelley, would have been so proud.)

About 1/8th of our mission is providing money to other Dayton area non-profits. (This might be larger if we had less overhead, which is one of the reasons we’re asking you to consider helping us on #GivingTuesday). Another eighth of what we do is that we provide around 40 people, many of them quite venerable, with an important and meaningful hobby. (Have to keep those senior citizens off the streets!) We provide books to the public through our booksale (which also meant giving away several tons of books on Monday)– that accounts for roughly 25%.

In addition, we provide books for free throughout the year– to schools, literacy programs, clinics, community kitchens, other non-profits and the like. This past year we gave away around 400 cases, or about seven tons of books. At the end of the sale we gave away 20 more tons of books, some of which went to a literacy program and the rest went a recycling program run by developmentally challenged students at Meadowdale High School. Between donations (17%) and recycling (8%), that accounts for another chunk of pie.

The last piece is that we are a book repository. As grateful as we are to receive book donations from the public, the public is so glad to have someone to take the books. We create a great deal of joy when we say “Yes, we’ll come pick up the books” and “Yes, your donation is tax deductible” and “Yes, we’ll take your encyclopedias.”  When people need help, we will not only pick up the books, but we will bring boxes and help pack them. It’s a community service.

The Book Fair Foundation is run entirely by volunteers. No one draws any sort of renumeration. We have year-round expenses like rent and utilities. The more of our overhead that we can cover through other means, like donations and online sales, the more money we can give away in November.

We hope you’ll find us worthy.