“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
It’s no secret my husband I are educators. What many of you do not know is that we are educators in the community in which we live in. For many years now it has been a dream to promote literacy throughout our town. There have been many ideas that we bounced off of each other but none seemed to come to fruition.
One day my husband came up with the idea to build a Little Free Library. For those that are not familiar with Little Free Libraries they are basically book exchanges or dispensaries that operate under the motto “take a book, return a book”.
The Little Free Library organization provides you with pre-built Little Libraries but they cost a little more than what we could spend. So we set out searching on Pint rest for ideas and we decided we would attempt to find old metal newspaper dispensers.
After searching for a few weeks we finally found a gentleman selling a whole bunch of these dispensers about an hour from our home. We purchased 3 of them and my husband picked them up, cleaned them and stored them in our garage.
Next, we went to our local home improvement store and bought some outdoor paint by Behr. my husband painted it and cleaned it up and in no time we had a Little Free Library.
We also ordered the LFL charter online and within a week or so it had arrrived. The day came when we installed and had a Ribbon Cutting for our LFL. We had some members of the community attend and although it was a cold day we had quite a few donations that filled up our library.
The concept proved to be so popular that we soon cleaned and prepared another box to place next to the one we had. We also searched the Facebook marketplace for a bookshelf to purchase and place inside of our community center. After placing offers on some and some dud sellers we finally found a nice family about 15 minutes for our home that sold us a beautiful shelf for just $10! When we told them what we were using it for they also donated some books!!! I hope that family is blessed 10 times over 🙂
In short, we have received tons of community support and our overflow library has hundreds of books. We cycle out the books from our Little Free Library every so often so that our readers can choose from something new to read.
We wanted to make a difference in our community and we succeeded with this small project that was a dream of my husbands. We hope that this post will inspire you to create a project that can benefit your local community.
xoxo,
Michelle
Coupon Parents 