Bookmobile News

Thank you, Finley Foundation! The Ernest L. and Ruth W. Finley Foundation Board of Directors have made a supportive grant to the Free Bookmobile, as well as to our sister organization, the Sonoma County Book Festival. For decades now, Finley funding has made a huge impact on opportunities for citizens throughout our community, such as at the beautiful Finley Aquatic Center, and we are thrilled to join the family of projects they support.

Wow, what a donation! Our good friends at Amber-Allen Publishing just blessed us with thousands of dollars worth of their spiritual and personal growth books & audio! These titles, such as Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, have been extremely popular thus far and we are especially excited to get a broad variety of their new material in Spanish language, and on audio for our vision-impaired patrons.

Finding good stuff in Boyes Hot Springs

We are very pleased to offer a new website gallery with scenes from our summer adventures.  Make your way to http://freebookmobile.org and click on “Photos” then “2012″.  The latest album is on the right.  We are especially proud of the new paint job on the Free Bookmobile.  More shots of the vehicle’s new look, plus the very latest news, are available on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/freebookmobile (click on “Photos”).

Wow, what a gift! The community-minded folks over at Downtown Autobody in Rohnert Park/Cotati were moved to help us renew the appearance of the Free Bookmobile and did they ever! Completely free of charge, they cleaned up all the rust and other body issues and laid down a beautiful green base with Bahama yellow accent striping. Then they referred us over to Sign-A-Rama of Rohnert Park for the graphics treatment.

We are simply delighted with the result. No more anonymity on the roads out there, now we’re rolling loud and proud. We’ll get some photos up on our website soon but for now you can see more images on our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/freebookmobile). The final step will be a giant mural along the driver’s side, hopefully to be completed in the fall. Be sure to wave or honk when you see us around town!

Stacy and Glen celebrate overloading the Free Bookmobile's suspension

Well, ace book-drive coordinator Stacy Ruppert at United Way wanted to fill the bookmobile, and guess what? She did! The grand total from their book drive was 7,634 children’s books collected, plus 857 titles for adults. We are blessed with United Way’s partnership and thrilled to start giving these wonderful books away to lucky local kids…which we did this week, thanks to the fact that Stacy and her fellow staffers did such a great job sorting and boxing everything!

Huge thanks go out to all the participants, especially Exchange Bank for hosting most of the book bins at their branches, and JDS Uniphase, Amy’s Kitchen, Target in Rohnert Park, and St. John’s Elementary School in Healdsburg for coordinating their own mini-drives to support the project. What a generous community we live in!

Check out our major partners! These folks care about literacy and strongly support our mission to bring books to those in need throughout Sonoma County. Please consider them when you do business – the full list with descriptions can be found on the Partners page of our website (http://freebookmobile.org/), or by clicking anywhere on the image below.

If untangling terms like “organic” and “humanely raised” is a challenge, then Bruce Aidells’ The Great Meat Cookbook could be your savior.  Join us at bucolic Windrush Farms in rural Petaluma as Bruce, inventor of the flying sausage, previews his book in conversation with Sonoma County’s own food maven Michele Anna Jordan.  The event will raise crucial funds for this year’s Sonoma County Book Festival, a wonderful celebration of the literary arts to be held in September at Old Courthouse Square.

In addition to the mouth-watering conversation, we will be sampling a variety of sausages (vegetarian dishes, too), as well as local wines and Lagunitas Beer.  Tickets are on a sliding scale from $40 – 60, and children twelve and under are FREE!  The event is Sunday, August 5 from 2 – 5 Pm at 2263 Chileno Valley Road, Petaluma.  Please visit Brown Paper Tickets online or mail in your check by August 1 to PO Box 159, Santa Rosa, 95402.  For more information, contact J.J. Wilson at boxcar@sonic.net or (707) 795-9028.

A really important grant win for us!  Impact100 Sonoma is a women’s giving circle that aims to award an impact grant of $100,000 to a deserving Sonoma Valley non-profit each year.  This is their third year meeting that goal, with an all-time high 195 women participating.  Fortunately for us, they also offer community grants to smaller organizations such as the Free Bookmobile.  On the strength of our growing Neighborhood Libraries program, we were among several non-profits to receive a share of the remaining funds.  We want to extend big thanks to Impact100 for their faith in our work, and to our partners at the Friends of the Sonoma Valley Library.  We look forward to using this grant to establish new mini-libraries and service the ones we launched back in March.  You can read more about Impact 100 here: http://www.impact100sonoma.org/.

It’s here – our biggest children’s book drive of the year, coordinated by United Way of the Wine Country, Exchange Bank, and JDSU! Please help us break last year’s record of 5,000 kids’ books donated to the Free Bookmobile…and help insure that no matter what their families’ income or where they live, children all over Sonoma County will have great books to read this summer. Help us keep them motivated to learn!

In fact we depend on these donations not only for summer outreach but to supply our patron families with quality material all year long.  During the two weeks between June 7 and 21, please bring as many books as possible to any Sonoma County Exchange Bank location. And tell your friends and neighbors!  Click here to see more information available on the official drive webpage, including examples of the kinds of books we’re especially looking for. In short, our need is for all ages, from toddler through teen/young adult, and in both English and Spanish.

Thank you for taking the time to support the children in your community!

As we continue to expand our reach in terms of both variety of locations served and number of overall events, we are bumping up against the limits of our book supplies.  We are now coming to understand that our greatest needs are in specific categories, and because of our consistent service to children’s programs, these categories are unlikely to shift much over the coming year.  So please help spread the word!  We consistently need high quality:

• Board and flap books for toddlers with little hands
• Early reader books with large print, easy words, and lots of pictures
• Teen & Young Adult books, especially recent fiction
• Recent non-fiction for all ages (including adults!)
• Standard reference books: dictionaries, atlases, thesauruses