We’re expanding!
We are very excited - and extremely busy! - readying ourselves for not one, not two, but yes THREE new Bookbanks locations, opening at the start of March.
Bookbanks Lewisham will be open every Friday morning at the Lewisham Foodbank’s Catford distribution centre. Pictured above are some of our new team of local volunteers at our set-up day there on Friday. They’re ready now for our online training next week (more on this below).
Bookbanks Salford will be at CommUNITY Little Hulton on Wednesday mornings.
Bookbanks Cambridge will be at Cambridge’s C3 food bank on Friday mornings.
Thank you to all of you who have helped us get here!
How we set up in a new location
It costs about £1,500 to set up a new Bookbanks location (in case you are able to donate towards helping us open some more). I’m sure you’re keen to know: Where exactly does the money go, and what exactly are busy doing?
First there is a run of emails, video calls and in person visits, where Bookbanks and the food bank teams put their heads together to see if they will be good fit.
The main asks from us are storage, robust safeguarding procedures for us to link into, and footfall - so we can maximise our reach. In return, we provide plenty of books, events, links with the local community and - our magic ingredient - an incredible team of 8-10 local, bookish, trained volunteers. You can find all the info for interested food banks here - please do share it with your local food bank so we can find more great partners.
Once we’ve established a good fit, we then set to work building our team of volunteers. We put the word out through our own channels and the local books community - publishers, bookshops, literary festivals and more. Manchester Literature Festival were especially helpful in putting the word out for Bb Salford, we’re delighted to be welcoming several volunteers from Cambridge University Press to Bb Cambridge, and not only has The Sunday Times Get Britain Reading campaign been extraordinary in raising money and awareness for Bookbanks, but also two of their staff will be volunteering with us in Bb Lewisham!
While our local Bookbanks Leads conduct interviews with volunteers, I’m busy behind the scenes asking our generous stable of publisher, bookshop, and agent partners for books. We endeavour to set up with a wide range of about 500 books at each new location: toddler books, cookbooks, thrillers, poetry, short stories, history, classics and more. This should cover all bases for the first few weeks and then we track down more books in response to the particular appetite of that food bank. I can’t wait to discover what our guests want to read in Lewisham, Cambridge and Salford.
The following have been especially helpful, supplying books in this round of openings: Granta, Hachette, Pushkin Press, Awesome Books, Europa Editions, Magic Cat, Renard Press, Nosy Crow, CBC editions and LBA Literary Agency. They are some of many companies in the book industry who generously donate new books to us, often on a regular basis. We are so grateful! (If you work in the book industry and you’d like to set up book donations to Bookbanks, of course I’d love to hear from you, so please do drop me a line.)
In case you missed it, we’ve now given out over 16,000 books to people in poverty - thank you so much to all of you who have given us books to give on.
So the books arrive. Our A-frame signs and special ‘Free Books and Friendly Chat’ bookmarks are ordered. And volunteers are ‘onboarded’. This is our fifth cohort, swelling our numbers to 97!
Onboarding means that after interviews and reference checks, we have a big online training session for all our new recruits. This includes advice on how to display books, how to talk about - and beyond - books, safeguarding and more. There are, of course, role plays (and a tea break).
Finally, we have a site induction day (as pictured at the Lewisham Foodbank above), when some of our team arrive to sort boxes of books into food bank crates, write our sign, check everyone knows things like where the Fire Exits and First Aid Boxes are, and then we are ready to go!
The question is, where will we go next?
