Starting from November 13, 2010 to April 30th 2010, it will be my mission for a year to try to collect 100, 000 books for the Metro Detroit Literary Community.

I know the impact of books in a home for a child and I want to give every home that doesn’t have books in Detroit some.

This sounds like an interesting challenge and I’m asking everyone to help me.

Why?

I love books. My mother put that love in my heart way before I came into this earth and I’m blessed to have passed this love to my children.

Now I want to share my love with everyone out there who struggles to make a choice to buy a book or pay a bill in Detroit. I don’t want to see anyone have to make that choice.

Plus statistics states even one book in a household increases the chances of a child graduating from high school*

If you would like to drop your book off in person, subscribe to this site (see sidebar) and when you see I’m having an event, come and bring your books to donate (while picking up a couple of copies of mine – although that’s not a requirement). 

If you aren’t in Detroit and would like to send books, please ship them to:

Detroit Impact Community Center

Attn: Sylvia Hubbard

9930 Greenfield, Detroit, Michigan 48227

WHERE DOES ALL THIS GO AND WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM YOUR DONATION?

I know 100,000 books is a lot of books, but there is a meaning to my madness. These are the organizations that will benefit from your donation:

Pro-Literacy of Detroit – http://www.proliteracydetroit.org

During December, this organization has a graduation program for their adult readers who have successfully completed tutoring. Your book donations will go towards gifting them books they may take home as their reward to continue and strengthening their new-found reading skills.

The Detroit Impact Center – http://www.detroitimpactcenters.org/main.htm

Geared toward the youth in the Metro Detroit Community, The Detroit Impact Center provides literary services, programs and more. The library inside the center is under serviced and in desperate need of current books geared toward ages between tween and teen. I would love to give them what they need to encourage young adults to read more and provide Mr. Colbert, the director, the power to give these kids the gift of reading.

Also I’ve been approached by the following organizations to help them provide books for their participants.

The Fountain of Life COGIC – GED program for text books and educational books

My Sisters Keeper – Single Family Non-profit to gift single parents and their children with books for the holidays.

Help me help them!! I want to be the Oprah of book giving! The Santa Claus of the Literary Community. (I could go on with these metaphors, but they’d just get really corny. )

We hope to soon work with Kickstarter, so we can have a monetary donation system in place, but if you would like to contribute still, you can PayPal your donation to motownwriters@yahoo.com.

For all monetary donations, we plan to buy gift certificates from John King Books.  (http://www.rarebooklink.com/cgi-bin/kingbooks/index.html)

Established in 1965, recently, we found out that two of their stores were in danger or closing. In my creative way to shed light upon a low foot traffic situation to the stores,  I’ve decided that proceeds earned from donations will go to buy gift certificates from John K. King Bookstore and donated to the groups above so they can also make selections.

Also, this will ensure your donations will go right back into the literary community of Metro Detroit!

I do hope you help me meet my goal. I’m so excited about my mission and I’m going to blog all about it here at my website with the category tag 100,000.

Spread the word! Send the message! Shout it from the rooftop: There’s a crazy book lady in Detroit who needs books! (I don’t mind the crazy part, because even my mother said I’m a good crazy.)

I thank you in advance for your help to my literary endeavors!

*I couldn’t remember where that statistic came from before I blogged this, but it was in the last couple of months that I read it.

As the list of sponsors grow, I’m going to be posting sponsors to this post. If you’d like to know when I make updates to this particular post, please add a great comment and subscribe to comment updates.

I’d also like to know what efforts you are doing to strengthen your literary community and if you have creative ideas to help me encourage my own literary community to donate more.

I plan to do more face to fact book drop off events for the next 365 days. If you would love to help me plan these, please do not hesitate to contact me at my email: motownwriters@yahoo.com.

If you are media interested in requesting an interview about our literary cause, please contact Andrea Daniels of ANDCommunications at: 313.468.2459.

If you could use the sharing options below to send this message to help us, the literary community (and I) would certainly appreciate this as well.