Charity Profiles
If you belong to a nonprofit that would like to have remainder books in the final hours of the sale, check back a month or so before the next sale in March, 2024 for a contact. We require all participants to show that they are with an official 501c3-type nonprofit.
Here are just a few of the groups that have collected books at the end of the sale. Some have been coming for a decade or more!
Minister Ekbo Ekbo chooses books at the sale.
Books for Africa (New York, NY) collects books of all kind to donate to libraries and Bible schools in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and the English-speaking Ivory Coast. Minister Ekbo Ekbo, a Nigerian living in New York City, collects and ships a shipping container of 15,000-20,000 books to Africa every year. He finds them at book sales all over the east coast but, he says “This is probably one of the best: this is where I get the most books.”
Mihee Kim with Book Sale representative Marietta Taylor.
Carrier Clinic (Skillman, NJ), a private psychiatric hospital, provides books for adult patients on the acute care unit. Group Counsellor Mihee Kim gets collections of short stories, inspirational and self-help books, and graphic novels at the book sale.
Wendel Thomas with Book Sale representative Marietta Taylor.
The Global Literacy Project (New Brunswick, NJ) finds books for schools all over the world. GLP and its group of international partners identify rural schools with libraries of 100-200 books, including those in South Africa, Kenya, the Caribbean, and India. Through book donations and arrangements with sales like BMW, the Project can increase these school libraries to thousands and, in one case, 100,000 books. It also searches for specific types of books for partners with special requests. At the 2014 sale, representative Wendel Thomas combed the collection for math, physics, engineering, and chemistry text books for a new technology-based school in Kampala. Thanks to its focus on non-fiction, the BMW sale is one of the few organizations that can provide charitable groups with text books on technical and scientific subjects, as well as theological, music, and art texts.
Anne Reeves (left), founder of Red Umbrella, with Literacy Project’s Veronica Olivera.
Princeton Nursery School (Princeton, NJ) is a school for low-income families that is funded by grants and other public funding with minimal family payments. The school serves not only the children who attend school daily, but also their parents. The PNS Literacy Project teaches low-income adults – many of them Spanish-speakers – to read, often starting with books in Spanish and then moving to English. The Literacy Project’s Veronica Olivera is shown here in the children’s book section with Anne Reeves, founder of Princeton’s summer reading program for minority children, Red Umbrella.
Alexa Grabelle (in yellow) and a few of her happy book recipients.
Bags of Books (Voorhees, NJ) is the brainchild of Alexa Grabelle who conceived of the idea in 2012 when she was 10 years old. Alexa founded BOB to help prevent the educational summer slide that occurs when children are not able to read during school breaks. Since its inception, BOB has grown to promoting literacy, and supplementing deficient school libraries and under-funded summer programs. To date, Alexa has collected over 15,000 books for children in Camden and Philadelphia and has donated other volumes to over 2,300 students.
