Every year since we started Picture Book Summit in 2015, we’ve picked a charity partner to receive a portion of each PBSummit ticket. It makes us giddy to give back to the literacy community and help get more books into the hands of kids. We make it a point to donate to charities that bring books to children around the globe and around the corner.
Over the last seven years we’ve donated over $37,000 to:
- We Need Diverse Books
- Two Title I Schools in Oregon and Connecticut
- Reading Partners
- San Juan Public Library in Puerto Rico
- Project Night Night
- Binc – The Book Industry Charitable Foundation
- Little Free Library’s Read in Color Program
You can find out more details about our previous charity partners on our Charity Partner page here.
This year we are pleased to announce we will be donating again to San Juan Community Library in San Juan, Puerto Rico!
Here’s a little bit about the San Juan Community Library from their Executive Director Connie Estades:
“Now in our 35th year, San Juan Community Library is a treasured and vital resource for adults and children from all walks of life. Equally important, our patrons and visitors are from cities throughout Puerto Rico. We currently house 32,000 hard copy books, 7,000 ebooks and audio books, and 45,000 ebooks from the public domain. We are excited to share that during the last three years we circulated a combined total of 42,323 hard copy and digital titles (and that includes the year of the four-month lockdown!). We accomplish these goals with a volunteer staff, a paid part-time executive director, a board of directors, invaluable help from the municipality of San Juan, and the generosity of our members and donors.
Many people have told us that they discovered their careers here at our library, among them librarians, teachers, and authors. Libraries hold more than dreams and books; they hold the power to impact lives for the better.
Thank you so much for your support over the past several years. Thanks to your generosity we have added current fiction titles for young adults and children to our digital branch and to our hard copy titles. We would not have these titles without you! We are grateful that you have joined our library’s efforts to provide San Juan and communities from all over Puerto Rico with a lending library open to the general public. Together we provide our island with great books, information, and life-changing opportunities.
Thanks…for this amazing opportunity. We are forever grateful!”
Here’s a quick tour of the San Juan Community Library:
After seeing the devastation of the library during Hurricane Maria, we reached out to the team at the San Juan Community Library to see if we could help in their recovery efforts. Here’s how they used our 2018 donation:
- $2,400 of their donation for hard copy titles for our children and young adult collections
- $3,107 for e-books and audio books for children and young adult e-books.
- $1,000 to their digital branch
- $900 for public computer renovation
A local Eagle Scout even built a bookcase to house books purchased with our Picture Book Summit donation:
We never could have imagined when we started eight years ago that we would have our own bookshelf in a library! That bookshelf and all those books were made possible by our Picture Book Summit attendees! Because of you, we’ve been able to help the library recover and provide them with even more titles for kids to read and discover new worlds.
Seeing how diligent the team at the San Juan Community Library was with our donation and just how much of an impact our donation made on them, we are thrilled to partner with them again for 2022.
