Refill the Shelves 2024 Results & Impact

Our shelves got a little fuller this summer.

In May, Books for Keeps kicked off our summer with a big goal to get 15,000 books back onto our shelves to be shared with kids across our community. We invited you to donate books (or dollars to purchase books), host book drives in your community, and volunteer in our warehouse. And thanks to your generosity and support, we are excited to share that together, we refilled the shelves with 21,200 books! 

Every new children's book that landed on our warehouse shelves from May to August (and all books purchased with financial gifts during the campaign) will be shared across our book distribution programs this school year. Not only did you help us exceed our goal -- your support will help provide summer reading for over 1,765 kids in 100+ classrooms!

To everyone who gave a book, a dollar, or an hour of volunteer time, thank you for inspiring joyful experiences with literacy for kids of all ages and expanding book access for families across our community. We could not do this work without partners like you! 

A Few Special Shout-Outs To: 

• Denise Ricks & the Edward Jones Team, thank you for hosting a children's book drive at your office early this summer, collecting hundreds of books! Thank you, Denise, Sam, and the whole EJ team! 

• Ryan Dobrin, who ran a half-marathon to support Books for Keeps. He and his community raised enough money to purchase books for 4 elementary classrooms! Thank you, Ryan! 

• Reign Streiter, who hosted a birthday fundraiser, asking his community to support literacy for! In just one day, his community raised enough money to purchase nearly 800 books! Thank you, Reign! 

• The LuluMa Foundation for their continued partnership towards our book access programming. Their support helps us to get a head start on summer book purchasing, ensuring that every child we serve will have hundreds of brand-new books to choose from. Thank you, LuluMa Foundation!  

About Refill the Shelves 2024

Every year, Books for Keeps distributes around 75,000 books to over 6,500 elementary students. Through this program, every child has the opportunity to personally select 12 new, high-interest books that they want to take home for keeps, one for every week of the summer. We do this to help inspire joyful experiences with literacy, help students maintain their academic momentum during the summer months, and expand book access across our community and beyond.

All books are provided at no cost to kids, families, or schools, thanks to YOU! Our community of donors help make this possible, starting with our Refill the Shelves campaign each summer. This campaign is an opportunity for us to literally begin refilling the shelves in our BFK Warehouse that get emptied out during book distribution season. For the first time ever, we set a book goal for the 2024 campaign. 

Behind the scenes, our team begins preparing for the next year's Spring Book Distributions at the very beginning of the school year. Meeting our big 15,000 book goal will help us start the year strong, with enough books to provide summer reading for over 1,200 students! That translates to over 80 classrooms, 20 grade levels, or 3 entire elementary schools prepped with a summer's worth of reading before the school year even starts! None of this work would be possible without the generosity of our community, and we are so grateful to get to partner with you as we prepare for and begin another school year.