The Book Exchange of Marin

Mission: The Book Exchange of Marin promotes child literacy, encourages a love of reading, and works to ensure that all under-resourced Marin County elementary and middle school children have access to good books.

Goals and Values:

• To acknowledge and positively impact the effects of social and economic inequality by ensuring that all children can have good books in their homes.
• To enable all children, especially children of underserved communities, to see themselves and their communities represented in books and to broaden their world through reading.
• To support educators as they develop and inspire the next generation of readers.

The Work We Do:

We re-home lightly used books in support of a sustainable environment and the next generation of readers and educators.

We collect, sort, organize, shelve, and make available lightly-used, quality K-12 books of all kinds, both fiction and nonfiction.

We make these books and materials available for free or minimal cost to students, teachers, families, and various non-profit community organizations through:

• Scheduled classroom field trips – Classes of students and their teachers from Marin’s Title I schools travel by bus to The Book Exchange facility. Each student can select a bag of free books for themselves or a sibling to take home and keep. Teachers can also select free books for their classroom libraries.
• Weekly open hours at The Book Exchange for teachers and all community members to come select and purchase books at nominal cost.
• Special evening and weekend events.