After posting about the Dewey Donation System last week, I got an email from Logan Kleinwaks, the president of an organization called Book Wish Foundation. Logan asked,

Dear Sarah,

I just found Tomato Nation through an article on philanthropy.com that mentions your success fundraising for DonorsChoose. No, I’m not asking you to fundraise for my new nonprofit (Book Wish Foundation (but I would love your help in a non-financial way.

You wrote in your about the Dewey Drive that “nobody knows better than Tomato Nation readers what a big difference books can make.” Any chance you could encourage your readers to share their thoughts (or videos, with our without head-shaving) on this subject on my nonprofit’s website at www.bookwish.org/share? We are asking for submissions on three themes related to our mission of providing reading relief for people in crisis: “what reading means to me,” “how learning English changed my life,” and “the ideal library for a community in crisis.” The first is pretty close to what you wrote. We hope these submissions will draw attention to the importance of reading, especially for people in crisis, for whom it can have significant educational, mental health, and occupational benefits. (Note: there might be a brief delay before submissions appear on the site, while they wait to be checked by humans for spam.)

Incidentally, our current focus is a project aimed at providing Darfurians in the Bredjing, Treguine, and Gaga refugee camps in eastern Chad and their local Chadian neighbors in 18 villages with reading glasses, English language course material, secondary school textbooks, school supplies, dictionaries, and libraries (one in each camp and in a main village). This is our first project, and, if it is successful, we hope to expand to other crisis situations and provide books and other aid to enable, encourage, and facilitate reading.

Thanks for getting in touch, Logan. Readers, if you wouldn’t mind stepping over to the Book Wish site and talking a little bit about reading and libraries, they’d really appreciate it. It’s free!

After that, if you haven’t already done so, see what’s new at DDS — Glark and Pamie don’t just do good, they give things away, too, including a few prizes I’ve contributed (and one of them rhymes with “Schmarner’s Fodern Slamerican Vusage.” Just saying).

Share!