Big fun volunteering today!

Whew!

School's out here, and so I'm spending a lot of time doing crazy volunteer work.

I spent this morning and early afternoon at the holiday carousel at Westlake Center here in town--it's a fundraising gig for the Northwest Center, an organization for developmentally disabled folks. It was nice--I got to take tickets and make sure that the right number of people got on the carousel, reassure parents and remind kids that "we're walking carefully to our horses!" Nice. People were really happy to be out, and more than a few said that they were there because the power was *still* out where they live.

This evening, I spent about four hours working with a group that provides free books to incarcerated adults all over the country. It was really nice! I got requests from men & women (mostly from TX, for whatever reason) asking for classics like "Romeo and Juliet" ("because I was always told to read it and never did, so why not now?") and lesbian novels, Danielle Steele stuff, books about Jeffrey Dahmer and some about crafts and cooking ("I'm a cook here.") We rounded up requests the best we could and packed them up--we managed to get through most of the letters from August. (!) It was neat to find requests for authors and genres that I know and, even if didn't have the specific books they were looking for, find books that I knew they'd like. There were sad bits, too--lots of them. It was great, though, to be able to make (what may be) a difference in people's lives.

I'm pooped, but looking forward to tomorrow and another day of Winter Break volunteering!

Good for you. :toast:

That book thing sounds like a really neat program.

It's always great to find more groups that do work around literacy.

One of the reasons that I got ito this work in the first place (I'm a reading tutor for "at-risk" kids) is that I found out that the gov't and contractors use 3rd-grade literacy assessments to determine how many prisons they'll need 15 years down the line. So, I'm pretty into literacy support!

(And there are LOTS of books programs all over the country!)