Help the Friends Support Kansas City's School Children!
Help the Friends Support Kansas City's School Children.
During this Giving Season, we are committed to matching up to $10,000 for donations raised between December 1 - 31, 2020!
This year has provided us with ample time for reflection on what matters in our lives, hasn't it? One side effect of this pandemic has been a total slow down and recalibration of the normal way of things. We don't know about you, but we've been amazed at the resiliency, warmth, and love within this community this year. We are here to continue to support and amplify the mission of the Kansas City Public Library to provide for those in our community who need us. Together, we can make a difference.
Our goal with this year's Giving Campaign is to focus on the needs of Kansas City's school children by fundraising for two Kansas City Public Library programs that directly impact KC kids:
1.) Mobile WiFi Hotspots, after our successful summer campaign for this program, we know you see the value in it. The program has been such a good thing for our community, but a need persists. The more hotspots we can purchase, the more we can provide a critical connection to the internet for those who go without.
2.) Make. Do. Tell. with KCPL activity kits. Four days a week, a member of the Library’s Youth & Family Engagement team travels alongside the Kansas City Public School bus, making deliveries at each of the free lunch distribution sites, seeing approximately 100 kids per day (masked and socially distanced, of course!). We distribute free books and Make. Do. Tell. with KCPL activity kits to children and teens at each site. Along with a small bundle of supplies, each packet includes activity instructions and is tied to an instructional video posted on the KC Library Youth Youtube site (sample video). These activity kits are in high demand! Currently, our budget allows us to create and distribute 6,000 activity kits a month (3,000 kid kits and 3,000 teen kits) – but demand for the kits outpace our resources…by a lot! We would LOVE to be able to meet demand for the kits, which would require closer to 10,000 kits per month.
Donation goal
Help the Friends Support Kansas City's School Children!
All donations to the Friends of the Library are 100% tax-deductible and support the Kansas City Public Library, so don't hesitate to soar above and beyond to support the Library you love!
Consider that:
$100 connects one family to the internet at home for an entire school year, making possible the completion of online homework assignments, access to live tutoring, and exploration of college and job opportunities
$250 teaches 65 brand new parents about the importance of reading to their newborns and gives each baby their first book
$500 starts home libraries for 116 children living in poverty (extra important because being surrounded by books at home is the single most important predictor of student performance)
$1,000 grants a full scholarship to one adult earning their high school diploma and career certificate from the Library’s Career Online High School, giving them a second chance to build a better life for their family.
(In case all this impact isn’t enough for you, a one-time gift of $1,000 to the Friends today makes you a member of the Friends for life!)
Book Donations
DUE TO COVID-19, we are UNABLE to accept
donations at this time.
Thank you for thinking of the Kansas City Public Library when selecting a home your treasured items! The Friends of the Library will accept and sort your in-kind donations of books and other materials, finding new homes for them mostly through various book sales throughout the year. Some books may be donated locally to special groups.
To make a donation of just a box or two, you may bring them to the circulation desk of your local KCPL branch during open hours. To see a full list of library locations and hours, visit www.kclibrary.org/library-locations.
If you have more than 2 boxes of books to donate, please contact our "Master of Books", Tom, directly by email or phone at 816.529.5884. He'll happily coordinate a drop off or schedule a pick up. Even if you have trucks filled with boxes of books, the Friends will work with you to accept your gifts!
Please do not donate anything dirty, smelly, or damaged.
Please do not leave donations of any kind outside Library locations -- Library staff do not have the resources to collect the items on our behalf & we never want to give our Library friends more work to do.
Please do not bring a zillion boxes of books to your local Library location without first contacting the Friends. We will work with you so that we can meet you to accept your donation or arrive shortly after your drop off to clear the books out of the Library's way.
We accept:
- Fiction and nonfiction (both paperback and hardcover)
- Children's and young adult books
- Rare/vintage/antiquarian books (generally books published before 1955)
- Dictionaries and reference books
- Cookbooks
- Arts books (e.g. art, music, film, photography)
- Coffee table books
- Foreign language books with ISBN
- Travel or computer books less than 3 years old
- Textbooks less than 10 years old
- DVDs, CDs & Audiobooks
We do not accept:
- Soiled, broken, torn, or smelly books
- Encyclopedias
- Textbooks more than 10 years old
- Travel or computer books more than 3 years old
- Law and medical books
- Newspapers/magazines/journals*
- Readers Digest condensed books
- VHS/LP albums/audio cassettes
- "Play away" Audiobooks
*Local thrift shops often accept National Geographic magazines and videotapes.
Books are the heart and soul of the Friends of the Library, and we love finding new homes for them. Thank you for your gifts!