Bookmobile News

We are thrilled to announce support from the Community Foundation’s Healdsburg Area Fund! Our new grant will help us expand services to the Healdsburg & Geyserville areas. We are already very fond of the beautiful north end of the county and its denizens. Now we can increase both the breadth and frequency of our visits, to places like the 4Cs Child Development Center, the Boys & Girls Clubs, low-income senior housing, and a variety of fairs, festivals and fundraisers. Thank you, Community Foundation!

Upcoming Free Bookmobile  events in the area include the Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast fundraiser on Super Bowl Sunday morning (February 5) at Geyserville High School, and the Healdsburg Wild Steelhead Festival at the Plaza on February 11.  Hope to see you out there…

You can be a free book-giver too!  Thanks to a tip from one of our supporters, we are getting really excited about World Book Night 2012.  A grand success in the UK last year, this year they are hoping to enlist your help in giving away one million books in the U.S. on the night of Monday, April 23.

The hope is to turn a light or non-reader into a regular reader by sharing the joy of a great book.  Anyone 16 years or older can apply to be a giver, and the selection of books you can request is top-notch.  Give away 20 copies of your book and maybe change a life!  You can read more about it and apply on the World Book Night website.

We are now accepting audiobooks on CD!  Due to a shortage of donated books in large print format, we are opening our media preferences in hopes that audio titles will add variety for our patrons with vision challenges.  Besides, who doesn’t like being read to?

If you have CD audiobooks, please help us to help seniors and others who find it hard to read conventional material.  Bring them in to one of our drop-off locations listed on our website.  And thanks for your continued support!

After another terrific Bloomfield Volunteer Fire Department BBQ event back in late August, our warm reception there renewed our commitment to the sparsely populated southwest region of the county.  We confidently added Valley Ford to our monthly visit list beginning in October.  Three months later, we haven’t had much luck with patrons there, with no regulars to date.  So we have made our first adjustment to that monthly route: beginning in January, we’ll alternate the area stop between Valley Ford and Freestone.

Boosted by visitors to Wildflour Bread, our Freestone adventures have previously panned out well.  There are many residences within walking distance of our parking spot (on El Camino Bodega near the bakery), and this location is closer than Valley Ford to residents of Occidental and Graton, whom we hope will join us on those Freestone months.  No other changes are planned at this time, so we will still be serving Bodega Bay, Jenner, and Monte Rio as part of the west county route.

This holiday season we encourage you to give a very special gift: a gift of the Free Bookmobile experience to children in need.  We all know that the lack of public resources is hurting our schools and libraries but there is an immediate and tangible way to help!  Now you can fund a bookmobile visit to a local low-income children’s program or school, and honor a family member or friend in the process.  For each tax-deductible $75 donation we receive in their name, we can get high quality books into the hands of kids who really need them.  Kids who experience a variety of barriers to access to literacy materials yet could benefit so much.

Not only that, the children will enjoy the entire Free Bookmobile experience – the excitement of climbing on board, exploring the magic we have tucked away in each nook and shelf.  Feeling the empowerment of choosing books of their very own to take home and read with their families.  We’ll notify your loved ones with acknowledgment of your generosity, so they’ll know they have helped provided crucial literacy support to their community.  We can even combine smaller gifts to make this outreach happen!

Giving is easy.  We’ve upgraded our donation software for a smoother online experience, so just click on the picture of the present or go to http://sonomacountybookmobile.org/donate.html.  Enter the amount of your gift(s) in the new Google Checkout box and hey – you’ve saved yourself a trip to the mall!  We’ll email you for the names of your honorees, or we can send you gift notification cards to present yourself.  If you’d prefer to mail a check, please include the same information and send to:

Free Bookmobile of Sonoma County

PO Box 159

Santa Rosa, CA 95402

Wishing you peaceful holidays, and thanks for your support!

Facebook has obviously matured into a strong tool for sharing and networking, two of the things we at the Free Bookmobile enjoy doing the most.  We have thus established a presence on the social networking site and look forward to providing our friends and fans the inside scoop on our programs.  We have some photos and a bit of news posted already, and the content will grow quickly as we explore the possibilities.  Please check it out, be sure to “Like” us, and tell your friends!

http://www.facebook.com/freebookmobile

As always, we are happy for your feedback.  What would you like to see offered on our page?

We have to admit that, from the beginning, people often assumed that we were part of Sonoma County’s official government services.  The fact that the local library system is called “The Sonoma County Library” and that public libraries are the usual sponsors of outreach like ours strengthened this supposed link.  We spend time each day we are out giving away books clarifying our status as an independent non-profit not formally associated with the library system.  So it’s finally time to make an adjustment and reduce confusion!

From here forward, we will be known as the Free Bookmobile of Sonoma County.  It’s important that we still describe the area that we serve and we are especially glad that the new name further emphasizes the fact that the books are free.  Our website will be sporting new logos soon, and because our vehicle hasn’t yet been painted, we’re in time to get our new name on there…as soon as we can raise the funds to do so!

Based on population density and income level, southwest Santa Rosa has been desperately appropriate for a public library for many years.  Unfortunately our community services have been steadily stripped of funding and there is no relief in sight.  That is why, back in March, the Sonoma County Free Bookmobile eagerly agreed to establish our original bookmobile trailer on permanent loan at Landpaths’ Bayer Farm.  Bayer is a unique resource in the heart of the Roseland neighborhood: an urban farm, learning center, positive gathering site for local families – and hopefully a city park in the making.

Landpaths’ Bilingual Program Coordinator Magdalena Ridley recently gave us great news about the extensive utilization of the “Kids Club” trailer over the summer.  Not only did site staff open the bookmobile every Friday during their free summer lunch program, they also hosted a number of special events and multiple visits by the local Boys & Girls Club.  The grand total was several hundred unique visitors, not only children ages 0 – 18 but neighborhood adults as well, and “…each time the books were a huge hit,” writes Magdalena.

The maintenance of the trailer and book collection is catching on as well.  “The bookmobile was tagged fairly brutally with some bright red gang graffiti but a neighbor who walks there every day has taken it upon herself to repaint it each time,” continues Magdalena.  “We are in the process of planning a mural with some local young artists.  People from the community are beginning to bring their extra books – it is becoming a lending library.  We are very thankful for this amazing resource!”

The Free Bookmobile staff was fortunate to attend Bayer Farm’s Corn Festival in October and reunite with our faithful old steed for the evening.  We were encouraged by what we saw: both a growing familiarity with the use of the ‘mobile on some of the children’s eager faces, and plenty of the surprise and delight that often accompanies a first encounter with our services.  At the end of the night we left behind several boxes of brand new early reader books, and we took away big huge grins.

We are very pleased to announce receipt of a 2012 Community Improvement Grant through the City of Santa Rosa.  We will use these funds to build much-needed shelving inside our book storage unit, as well as apply gravel to the approach so our wonderful volunteers can continue to deliver books throughout the winter.  This was a big problem last year as mud and heavy boxes of books don’t mix!

We appreciate the work of the Community Advisory Board, a volunteer group that reviews applications for funding from groups who want to make a difference in Santa Rosa.  Many of the proposed projects are innovative grass-roots efforts, and we applaud city support at this level of people helping people in their own neighborhoods.  For our part, we have expanded services in Santa Rosa dramatically this past year, giving away great books to people of all ages, including the little ones at all the State Preschools and Child Development Centers.

In a long overdue upgrade, our website’s tax-deductible donation processing is now being handled by Google Checkout software rather than PayPal.  While PayPal is certainly a well-known brand, we had technical problems with their standard button script: it required particular web browser cookie settings to function properly, and the donation button did not even appear on some Mac platform browsers.  Their support team was friendly but unable to offer improvements.  So we have made a move to Google Checkout, which appears to be running smoothly.  Donors must have a Google account to use it but can easily create one while donating if necessary.

While investigating the options, we discovered that Google also offers free “AdWords” search-engine advertising and other cool tools for select non-profits through their Google Grants program, to which we plan to apply.  Please let us know if you have any trouble using this service to invest in our important work!  And thank you for your continued support.