At West, the library provides many different resources for all sorts of student needs. They provide crafts, games, hygiene products, and various genres of books. The library has a decently sized collection of books, and their fundraiser with Brilliant Books focuses on adding diverse authors and books to the collection. While the library does have a budget, it doesn’t cover all of the purchases that the library needs to cover, and that’s where fundraising comes in.
“Basically, someone interested in supporting the initiative chooses whether they want their purchase to support the elementary, middle, or high school libraries and click the appropriate link on the fair homepage (https://www.brilliant-books.net/tcaps-libraries-diverse-authors-book-fair). From that point until they close their browser window, 25 percent of anything they purchase is donated back to the library system they chose as book credit,” Caitlin Marsh, a spokesperson from Brilliant Books, said.
The bookfair has been operating around this time of year online since 2020 with credit for starting the fair going to Ashley Ko and Larissa VanderZee. Any person who can access the Brilliant Books website has the opportunity to purchase books that support any TCAPS library.
“During the pandemic, in-store book fairs weren’t possible, so a virtual format made sense. Additionally, this was about the same time that the Black Lives Matter movement gained ground; while this fair isn’t exclusively about racial diversity (there are so many different kinds of diversity to consider!), that movement did help provide a catalyst for this project to help get it off the ground while interest in supporting diverse library collections was especially high,” Marsh said.
Once the books are purchased online, 25% of the proceeds go to Genevieve Minor, as she is head librarian at West. Minor uses the money she receives to target specific books that will raise the diversity in the library’s collection of books.
“One of the goals is bolstering our indigenous peoples books, indigenous authors or stories about indigenous people […] It also goes towards any global authors and topics and stuff like that,” Minor said.
After the books are put into circulation in the library, students and teachers can check them out. English teacher Kelly Rintala knows that the library staff stay consistent with purchasing new and diverse books.
“So, reading is all about sort of opening up your point of view. It builds empathy around your emotions and feelings for the characters. So if you have those from diverse authors who have had different experiences from your own it makes everybody more well-rounded,” Rintala said.
While the fair has good intentions, it does not get a ton of participation. TCAPS has sent out emails with the link, but besides that the fair has not gotten a ton of advertising.
“I saw the link that was sent to us [and] sent to everybody, probably [from] TCAPS. So all I know is what I’ve read of that link,” Rintala said.
The money from the fair is only spent on the books, but the library has other needs that are not funded by the budget or the current fundraiser.
“To be able to provide really cool activities or things that students need that is not a normal thing that’s like funded by a school, you know, so I like filling in the gaps and that’s a lot like with the book fairs.We purchase a lot more books than what my budget allows for, and so different fundraising activities and things allow me to fill in you know gaps because there’s these extra revenue sources,” Minor said.
One of the other large fundraisers that the library has is the can drive. There are boxes that are placed in multiple classrooms throughout the school where students can place their empty cans. The money from returning these cans is used by Minor to purchase things for the library and school that aren’t necessarily books.
“I bought other things like our playing cards, for example they are used every single lunch period, and there’s always kids, whatever, playing Euchre, playing solitaire, playing, whatever […] I just don’t have the library budget for that, or sometimes it’s like it’s things that I don’t even know, that as far as like all the rules and regulations, like I don’t know if I can use my tax dollar library budget to buy tampons. It’s not really like a library need and so I like having this like secondary income,” Minor said.
