May 13 (Day 74) Read & Release

Today's post highlights an awesome, fun idea... An eco-friendly way to promote a love of reading and sharing and good will.  Check it out and get involved! 

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym -- anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel. Track the book's journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.


Join hundreds of thousands of active BookCrossers daily in our many forums to discuss your favorite authors, characters and books in every genre throughout history right up through current releases.

Join BookCrossing. Help make the whole world a library and share the joy of literacy. Reading becomes an adventure when you BookCross! Register and release your favorite (or even your not-so-favorites which you are ready to pass along) books to travel the world and find new readers! Join 859,310 people in over 130 countries and become a BookCrossing member for FREE. Sign up -- it takes less than a minute.





Source: www.bookcrossing.com

April 23 (Day 54) Sheltering Books

When Mackenzie Bearup was diagnosed with a condition that caused her chronic pain, the only thing that took her mind off her pain -- the only escape she could find -- was reading.


And when her pediatrician told her that the nearby Murphy-Harpst Children's Center -- a residential treatment center for Georgia's most severely abused children -- had a library but no books for the children to read, Mackenzie had an idea.


She began collecting books, asking everyone she knew for donations. She even stuffed flyers inside mailboxes, placed newspaper ads and started a Web site. Once the library at Murphy-Harpst was full, Mackenzie found other places that desperately needed books, such as children's homes and homeless and domestic violence shelters.

Mackenzie was only 13 years old when she began collecting childrens books for shelters. Her book drive quickly took off. Today she has collected and donated over 38,000 books to shelters in several states. She's so far donated books for libraries and reading rooms in 27 shelters. And with her mother's help, the teenager launched her official nonprofit -- Sheltering Books -- last year. For her work helping to spread the healing power of reading to disadvantaged kids, Mackenzie has been named a CNN Hero.

"If one homeless or abused child finds a love of reading through books that I've given them, then that will help them in school and just turn their life around entirely," she told CNN. "I really think that reading can do that for someone."

Read the CNN Heroes article about Mackenzie here.

Click here for information on how to donate or collect books for Sheltering Books.  Here is a super easy way you can get your kids involved in helping... Go to the post office and pick up a prepaid flat rate box, go buy a few books or hold your own book drive at work or school and send those books to Mackenzie. 

Wow, I am really amazed at another young person who "does what they can, where they are, with what they have!!"  Mackenzie Bearup.... YOU ROCK!! 
Sources:  Sheltering Books
               Good News Now