Freshman Heavenly Flores decided to donate her textbooks to the American Humanics Nonprofit Management Program. All donated books will be sold and profits will go to Nonprofit Literacy Partners worldwide. | Jairo Razo/The Daily Cougar
The time of the year to sell back textbooks is right around the corner, and UH students have a critical decision to make: sell the book back or donate the book and have a chance to help students across the globe.
From Monday to May 14, the American Humanics Nonprofit Management Program, with help from Better World Books, will be hosting a book drive in which all books collected will be resold by Better World Books with the proceeds going to Nonprofit Literacy Partners worldwide.
“This isn’t like a normal book drive,” UH American Humanics Community Outreach Chair Christen Egge said. “A big difference of what we are doing compared to other schools is we have been working on this since January. We have a marketing plan that we have been working on, and we tried our best in planning. We didn’t just put out bins to collect books; we tried to make an effort to let people know exactly what our book drive is for.”
Better World Books is an online book company whose mission statement is “to capitalize on the value of the book to fund and support literacy initiatives locally, nationally, and around the world.”
“Better World Books collects used books and resells them online like Amazon does, but all the money they get from reselling the books is donated to non-profit organizations throughout the world,” Egge said. “It’s a really neat project that UH can get involved in.”
Egge and her peers remain passionate about the book drive and are doing everything they can to encourage UH students to donate their books instead of reselling them at the bookstore.
“There are so many people who are less fortunate than students at UH. There are children in the world who walk 10 miles to school to learn how to read,” she said. “If each student would donate just one of their books, we would have a chance to help eager students around the world. Some of the books are even sent to Books for Africa, a program in which books are sent straight to African library’s for students to read.”
Drop bins are located on campus at the C.T. Bauer School of Business, the M.D. Anderson Memorial Library, the leasing office of the Cullen Oaks apartment complex and in the American Humanics room in the Graduate College of Social Work.
