My Nonprofit Reviews

The African Library Project has a win-win partnership model for enabling literacy in Anglophone African countries: ALP's African partners reach out to and vet schools in their countries with few or no English books, and ALP's US volunteers are paired with those schools to collect 1,000 gently used books especially suited for those schools and raise about $500 to ship them via ALP's efficient, shipping container method. Each ALP African partner trains teachers in those schools to be librarians, and the result is increased literacy and a love of reading by the students, teachers and communities. This model produces US volunteers who repeatedly sign up to be matched with ALP schools/communities to collect and ship books--and even thank ALP for the satisfaction and opportunity of giving books a second life where they will be prized and read again.

I feel honored to feel a close bond with ALP's African partners. As an ALP volunteer, ALP Malawi liaison, former board member, 5-time ALP African Partner Summit participant, and frequent contributor to ALP book drives, I am honored to contribute time and funds to ALP's mission of hanging lives book by book in rural Africa. ALP is a very worthy non-profit!

The African Library Project has a unique and tremendously effective relationship with African partners in six (and counting!) countries. It is this partnership, along with model of organizing book drives in the U.S. to supply beautiful, gently used books to rural schools and communities in Africa that led me to be on the ALP board for six years and continue involvement as a volunteer and donor. Can you imagine an all-volunteer organization that can establish over 1,000 libraries in just seven years -- with lots of book-drive organizers thanking ALP for the privilege of collecting books and funds for shipping them? And wanting to do another book drive? This happens often because the process is fun and rewarding, and it works.

ALP's African partners are dedicated in receiving the book shipping containers, delivering them to the new school and community libraries, training the teacher-librarians, and following up. I have visited dozens of the libraries with ALP-donated books and seen the pleasure and learning the books bring to African children and adults.

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