As Elizabeth Ballou watched the news about the migrant children separated from their families after crossing the southwest U.S. border, she was moved to help them. She wanted to make a difference, so she decided donating books would be meaningful to her and make an impact on the kids as well.
But when Ballou searched for an organization that was already sending books to the detention centers housing children, she found out there weren’t any. That’s when she knew she had to start something and reached out to the nonprofit D.C. Books to Prisons to see if they could work together on the project. Ballou got in touch with one of their founding board members, Kristin Stadum, and together they started the project, named 2,000 Libros, which launched on the Fourth of July.
They’re looking for “new and gently-used Spanish-language and bilingual books for early to mid level readers” and they’re working with local D.C bookstores and have a wishlist up on Amazon.
“We can’t free their bodies,” Stadum says. “But we can help them escape a little bit through the written word.”
Source: ThinkProgress