Volunteers Ship Book Donations at Mineola Library

The held Book Donation Volunteers last week in an effort to donate books to the charity Reading Reflections. It was the first time the library held the program, which was intended to give the volunteers grades 6 to 12 an opportunity to give back to the Long Island community.

“I first got the idea by reading about people putting together care packages for soldiers and sending them overseas,” said Youth Services Librarian Vivian Yuan, who organized the program. “I looked around and noticed Reading Reflections has two locations on Long Island. We have plenty of donations given to us by the community of used and gently used books.”

The library’s budget is not large enough to conduct an event like putting together soldier care packages to send overseas. As a result, Yuan looked for the perfect chance to make a difference in the local community.

“I wanted to create more volunteer opportunities for children and older teens,” she said. “I think it’s a great chance for them, and a lot of them need volunteer credits for school or for religion (class).”

For participating in the program, each student received a certificate and letter acknowledging their involvement in addition to volunteer credit.

Many of the books packed were originally donations to the library, some specifically for this charity. Once all the books were packaged, Reading Reflections came to the library to pick them up and distribute them to needy communities in the U.S. and overseas.

Each of the books was checked and inspected to ensure they qualified as “new or gently used” and free of any signs of wear or library labels.

Sandeep Bharti took advantage of this event after his mother mentioned it to him, seeing it as a good way to help give someone a great opportunity that they didn’t previously have.

“Children need to read books, books are knowledge,” he said. "They have to read books in order to have success.”

Julianne Ortiz also heard about donating books to Reading Reflections through her mother. For her, it was a chance to her passion for reading with a way of helping the less fortunate.

“I love to read, and knowing that other people get to read really great books is a really cool thought for me,” Ortiz said. 

The library collected a total of eight boxes of donated books. Yuan hopes to hold this program again once the library accumulates enough donations.