Little Free Library Volunteers Needed
April is National Volunteer Month and a great time to recognize the key roles volunteers play in helping Southwest Human Development serve more than 140,000 children and families each year.
Many of our volunteers power the SWHD Little Free Library program — a fast-growing program that is always seeking people to help in a variety of ways.
Since 2015, Southwest Human Development has been putting up Little Free Libraries in the Phoenix Metro area in neighborhoods where there are likely to be children that do not have books in their homes. In the past 9 years, there have been over 250 Little Free Libraries assembled and installed in our community.
“We needed to take that next step toward sustaining Little Free Libraries that we’ve installed in the community by ensuring that the libraries are stocked with books,” said Jake Adams, Chief Development Officer at Southwest Human Development, “This is important to SWHD because language development for young children start long before their first word is spoken. Through reading to young children from the start, parents and their child bond and the child hears their parent’s voice and reading books over and over provides important repetition of words.”
A group of hardy volunteers recently completed an assessment of the libraries in our network, and now our attention turns to making sure we are regularly restocking these units to ensure that when children walk up to one of these Little Free Libraries, they will find books!
Southwest Human Development is looking for help in 4 ways:
- Little Free Library Corporate Team Build – Your company spends 2 hours to paint and assemble a Little Free Library. Teams of between 5-10 people work together to create a functional piece of art. We then put the library up in a neighborhood where children do not have access to books. Each library requires a donation of $1000
- Team LFL Members – Each Team LFL member is assigned 3-5 Little Free Libraries to visit every other week to ensure that the library is full of books. We provide the gently used books for restocking. Average amount of time per 2 weeks is 2-3 hours. Volunteers can sign up here: https://givepul.se/wrz6pk
- Gently Used Children’s Book Drive – we are looking to partner with church groups, elementary schools, companies and civic groups to collect gently used books to be distributed in the Little Free Libraries by Team LFL members. We also have a virtual book drive that all can participate in to support the books used in all SWHD early literacy programs including Little Free Library restocking.
- Super Volunteers – we are looking for a team of 3-4 people who will help to manage our Team LFL project; collaborate with the book drives and help to place Little Free Libraries in communities that need books.
Learn more and get information about each of these volunteer opportunities.