Bookmobile News

Hey, we’re having a fabulous fundraiser on March 14th! In partnership with the Sonoma County Public Library Foundation, we’re inviting you (yes, you!) to an evening of Chocolate and Cinema. How could you go wrong with that? A classic Cary Grant flick, delectable treats made by the county’s best chocolatiers, and the warm company of your fellow book lovers…hooray! You can buy tickets by clicking here.

For a modest $35 price of admission, which covers everything, you even get to pick a great book straight from the shelves of Sonoma County’s one and only Free Bookmobile. Click on the flyer image below for more details and mark your calendar now!

When we hatched the idea for a mural on one side of the Free Bookmobile, the priority was simple: it needed to be eye-popping. So we are just thrilled with this amazing act of love created by Maria Carillo Art Teacher Extraordinaire Catherine Borchert and her advanced students! Our mural is rolling testament to the joys of reading outside in the Sonoma County springtime. It’s even more gorgeous in person so you simply must check our event schedule and make a plan to come see the finally completed new look. In the meantime you can see a bigger photo on our Facebook page, which you don’t have to join to view, by clicking this link.

Pictured above is the dedicated art crew (Catherine at center left), who came out morning after morning in freezing temperatures, conjuring magic to make their paintbrushes dance and flow! We would also like to offer special appreciation to Maria Carillo Career Technical Education Teacher Lonnie Harwell and his students for their invaluable assistance in caring for the vehicle while it was at the school, and for sharing the shop space that facilitated a great final stage of creation.

A positive image is critical for our organization, especially as we depend on public support to continue our important work in promoting literacy.  This beautiful mural, already being admired by thousands of our fans and patrons as we resume our travels, will create awareness of what we do and will also attract new children and families to the vehicle, helping us serve more of them in the years to come. Thank you, Catherine!

Community Foundation is making the world a much better place! They were there for us when we were just getting off the ground, helping secure donor-advised funding to purchase our vehicle. They were there for us the following year when we needed to raise awareness of our success and expand our operational resources. And now we are delighted to announce another grant made by their Healdsburg Area Fund to help the Free Bookmobile continue its important work in the northern end of the county.

We will use this support to bring high quality books to children, adults, and seniors throughout the Healdsburg & Geyserville areas in 2013, as well as to establish a permanent Neighborhood Library in Geyserville. This is our second year in a row earning an award from the HA Fund and we feel blessed by the partnership. A huge thank you to all the CF donors, board members and grant committee!

The younger kids and their families are getting into the community service act, too! Hot on the heels of our big haul from Healdsburg, led by their high school Interact Club, we were blessed with bountiful donations from students at both Brush Creek Nursery School and Santa Rosa Accelerated Charter School (SRACS). We had a marvelous time picking up the books at Brush Creek, as the kids came on board to find out about what we do, and to learn that it’s fun to give as well as receive. The photo above shows some of the boys checking out the donations before they hit our shelves.  A big thank you to Cynara and all the families that participated.

SRACS is an old friend to the Free Bookmobile, having held one of our first children’s book drives two years ago, and our only bake sale benefit to date! Now they have a new crop of 5th and 6th graders and these students were eager to demonstrate commitment to local literacy by clearing out their homes of books they had outgrown. We salute the effort of teacher Leslie Loopstra and other staff members to integrate real world action into these kids’ curriculum. Go, SRACS!

Healdsburg High School Interact Club & Sponsors

Talk about a community effort! Led by local booster Andy Esquivel, the Interact Club of Healdsburg High School recently organized a book drive to benefit the Free Bookmobile. As soon as the word got out, these enterprising youths received a generous donation form the Healdsburg Community Church of about 2500 books. They then gathered several hundred more  through Healdsburg High families, the Healdsburg Senior Center, the Rotary Club of Healdsburg Sunrise, and the Rotary Club of Healdsburg.

It’s always inspiring to see youth in action, practicing the skills that will create tomorrow’s leaders. We were thrilled to be the recipients of their efforts this time around, and wish them the best in all their plans to make the world a better place.

Did you miss World Book Night earlier this year? This innovative program puts 20 copies of a great book into the hands of anyone who agrees to give them away to light- or non-readers. The idea is to introduce people to, or remind them of, the joys of reading and inspire them to continue doing so. Debuting in the US this past spring, World Book Night was a grand success and the Free Bookmobile an enthusiastic participant.

The website is now taking applications for prospective 2013 book-givers and they’ve got a terrific list of titles available. If the challenge of giving away 20 books on a single night in April seems daunting, you can always sign up anyway and pass the books to us. We’ll make sure to distribute them appropriately to the target audience!

Thanks to our good friends at Exchange Bank, we are now able to offer a much more convenient donation drop-off location for residents of east Santa Rosa and the surrounding area. Gently used books can now be brought into the EB branch located in the St. Francis Shopping Center (near Safeway) at the intersection of Highway 12 and Calistoga Road. Here are the complete address and business hours:

136 Calistoga Road, Santa Rosa  (539-1505)
Monday – Thursday 9 Am – 5 Pm, Friday  9 Am – 6 Pm, Saturday 10 Am – 2 Pm

This is the newest of five donation sites we maintain around the county; the other locations can be viewed on our website by clicking “Donate Books”. Our greatest need is still for toddler, early reader, teen/young adult, and recent/relevant non-fiction. Thank you for getting lonely books off your shelves and into eager new hands!

Though our initial visits to Valley Ford years ago were very much hit-or-miss affairs, with quite a bit of missing going on, we have been pulled back to that lovely area on the western edge of the county line through the warm reception we have lately been receiving from a few dedicated regulars, as well as the boost in motivation we always feel after the excitement of the Bloomfield VFD BBQ event each August. We’ve decided to give it a regular place on the monthly schedule again, alongside Freestone (we had been alternating the two).

We think this properly emphasizes a broader service coverage area even though it will shave a little time off the duration of our other west county stops that day. With a total of five locations to visit – Freestone, Valley Ford, Bodega Bay, Jenner, and Monte Rio – we will have to keep each stop to about one hour. The new plan, however, will help ensure that a larger range of residents have access to great books…and that’s really what it’s all about!

What began as a family community service project on the weekends has really blossomed. We are very proud to announce that we have recently passed quite a milestone – 20,000 people served! These are children, adults, and seniors throughout Sonoma County who have not only received books, but had a chance to enjoy browsing our mobile library to pick out more than 65,000 beautiful books of their choice to take home. Many of these citizens experience barriers of some kind in reaching libraries, or can’t afford to purchase books at stores. Children from homes without books may not even know what they’re missing. But we are changing that. Thanks to a wonderful and growing group of supporters, we are bringing high quality material directly to them. Reading stories to kids and inspiring the imagination. Driving right up to a disabled person’s doorstep. Installing little lending libraries to help communities help themselves.

Thank you so very much for all the time, money, and fabulous books you have invested in our mission. Very literally speaking, we could not have done it without your cheerful participation! May our collective momentum be ever forward, keeping us vital for many years, and many more thousands of patrons, to come.

The Free Bookmobile on location establishing permanent access to great books for Sonoma Valley residents

The Free Bookmobile strikes again!  As part of our Innovation Grant work with Impact100 Sonoma, we have begun installing additional Neighborhood Libraries throughout the Valley region, especially at locations which serve low-income and other access-challenged families and individuals.  This past Tuesday we first visited the Sonoma Overnight Support HAVEN shelter, which offers resources and a safe place to live while people get back on their feet.  The shelter had some older adult books but very little for other age groups. We provided fresh titles in both English and Spanish for toddlers, early readers, middle-levelers, teens and adults, all nicely organized by age/level.  Wishing these families lots of love with their new bedtime stories!

Our second stop was at the Sonoma Valley Community Health Center, where we had set up a lending library back in March.  Their shelves were half-empty and the toddler box was completely missing!  Fortunately we had plenty of high-quality replacements for them on board, including a new box of board and picture books for their little ones.

We finished the day at La Luz Center, which provides English language training, teaches computer skills, distributes food, hosts medical services, offers crisis counseling, and supports events that celebrate the richness of our multicultural community. Their English-language learners were on hand to board the Free Bookmobile and choose books to take home. Afterward it was our pleasure to fill their entire wish list of types of books that will support their non-profit mission, including a language reference set and beautiful new titles in Spanish for adults generously donated by Amber-Allen Publishing. We also left them with a big floor-box of multi-cultural beginner books for little hands.

La Luz staff will now be promoting our ongoing monthly visits to Boyes Hot Springs (at the Fiesta Center) so that their patrons can take better advantage of our outreach, and we look forward to serving them again at their facility in November!