This winter, our Rocklin community was extremely generous. We had enough new books, and funds donated to purchase new books, that 450 under-resourced kids received a new book for Christmas!
That was the happy ending to the tale of “The Blizzard and the Book Drive,” but that’s not the whole story…
Two weeks before the new books had to be delivered to our partners at KidzCommunity for distribution, our book order was placed, and the books were slated to be delivered in Rocklin on December 4, two days before distribution.
We didn’t have a polar vortex during Thanksgiving on our bingo card for 2024, and our book order was stuck in Buffalo under more than five feet of snow, with a new delivery date of December 9, days after we needed to have them for the kids.
Once we got the shipping update from the book company, our President Michele Vass got to work trying to figure out how we were going to get the 160 books we needed in less than a week. Michele’s husband, Trevor, reminded her about a connection she had made at the American Library Association conference that year with a VP at Penguin Random House and suggested she reach out to him.
Michele immediately emailed the VP she met at PRH and said a prayer. The next morning, to her amazement, Skip Dye, Senior VP of Library Sales and Digital Strategy, replied affirmatively that PRH would supply the needed books, do it for free, and pay to overnight the books from Indiana to California!
The books came in a day before the original book order was set to arrive, and they were a perfect assortment, providing lots of choices for the kids that were to be served this holiday season. The Friends cannot thank Penguin Random House and Skip Dye enough for making sure the kids we serve had the new books we fundraised to provide them.
What happened to the books stuck in Buffalo, you ask? They finally made it to Rocklin and will be used for our next book drive in 11 months.
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