Access Books Bay Area

Our mission is to level the literacy playing field for K-8 students living in poverty by providing high quality, high-interest, culturally relevant books, and a transformed school library space that invites students to spend time and read. We believe that books change lives, and that for children living in poverty, the school library is the best way to connect children with pleasure reading books. Studies have shown that reading for pleasure is one of the single greatest indicators of future academic success, yet the state of California provides no dedicated funding for school libraries, and many of the schools in the Bay Area have not funded their school libraries for decades, leading to out-dated collections and unattractive facilities. Our organization changes lives by making sure that the school library is an attractive place full of wonderful, interesting, recent, and culturally relevant books that will help them become lifelong readers.

We provide books to low-income schools where approximately 90 percent of students live at or below the poverty line. Most students at the schools we serve are children of color and children of immigrants. Our organization provides brand new, hardcover, high quality books to school libraries and gently used books to teachers for classroom libraries, as well as improving the library space by painting colorful, reading-based murals and providing new comfortable reading furniture.

We complete 2-3 library renovation projects each academic year, each taking place on a Saturday from 9am - 2pm. Volunteers from partner community service organizations collect the gently used books to be donated and provide volunteers for the project day.

We serve school around the bay area, although most of our work to date has been concentrated in the south bay and peninsula areas. We have renovated nine elementary and middle school libraries in high poverty areas to date, and have applications pending for four more, one of which will be renovated this spring.

Since our founding in 2016, we have provided over 5000 new books, and 15,000 used books to schools. We have served nearly 4000 students and their families, have worked with more than a dozen different service organizations, and have had almost 400 volunteers work on our projects.