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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | December 6, 2007

With the hopes of providing children in Chester public housing sites with food for thought books, sophomores Mai Schwartz ‘10, Casey Osborn ’10, Jake Ban ’10 and Gina Grubb ’10 are working with the Lang Center, Swarthmore Library and Chester Library to initiate a Bookmobile project. The Bookmobile project will provide children with the opportunity to read and borrow books donated by the on- and off-campus community by driving a children’s book-filled van into the housing sites during after-school hours.

According to Osborn, a group of students, including herself, took a Sociology & Anthropology seminar with Jennie Keith called “Social Change and Social Responsibility” that not only taught them about different strategies for implementing social change, but also actively placed them within a community organization in Chester where they spent two to four hours each week observing and interviewing members of the organization.

“We got together at the beginning of the school year … and we kind of talked about how we might be able to continue to work within Chester. A lot of us just felt compelled to continue to work within the city,” Osborn said.

After brainstorming project ideas, the group went to Delores Robinson, administrative assistant in the Lang Center, to make a proposal of their idea. “She knew what would work and what wouldn’t work. We initially thought that we would go to after school sites, [but] she suggested public housing sites,” Osborn said. According to Ban, a fellow Bookmobile organizer, public housing sites are something like compounds in which low-income families can stay for reduced prices.

The idea of the Bookmobile project is to provide an extensive book collection within the Bookmobile van that would be driven into Chester and provide the children at the public housing sites with a time period in which to read the books and engage in literary games. Eventually, the Bookmobile hopes to potentially provide the children with the opportunity to purchase or borrow books, though the logistics of these additional elements of the plan have yet to be resolved.

“To start, we probably wouldn’t be lending books out — just a two hour period where kids could read books,” Osborn said. “We’re hoping that at the end of the semester, if there are kids that have taken a particular liking to the Bookmobile, we would like to reward them with a book of their own … that is almost earned for being good readers.”

According to Ban, the project would be implemented in the afternoon, during after school hours, in order to provide the students with a space in which to continue reading in a non-academic, yet engaging setting. “The plan is to work in conjunction with the public housing sites as well as the public libraries and have our own mobile and go to the four different public housing sites in Chester and have volunteers read to kids,” Ban said.

Bookmobile organizers have already begun to collect book donations from the campus community by placing boxes around campus after the end of Thanksgiving Break to allow for students to bring back any unwanted or unused children’s books from home.

Osborn and the other organizers will also be working with the Swarthmore Library in the Ville in order to expand the collection of book donations in addition to the donations being collected on campus.

Other than the inspiration that came out of Keith’s first-year seminar last year and Ban and Grubb’s participation in Diane Anderson’s education class, “Literacies and Social Identities,” the Bookmobile organizers have recognized the need for an initiative that promoted literacy within these particular low-income communities.

According to Ban, there are limited, if any, after school programs available to the children in these communities and the bookmobile project hopes “to fulfill the niche in this way.” Another shortcoming of these communities has originated from the poor book collection in the Chester Library. In this sense, the Bookmobile project would “supplement” any inadequacies in the literary resources available to the children.

“We’re meeting with the librarian [of the Chester Library] on Friday, but we know they don’t have that many children’s books as most community libraries do,” Grubb said. “We’ll be trying to get those kinds of books…”

Although the project is still in the beginning of its planning stages, organizers already have big hopes and visions for the Bookmobile. “I really hope that we can get a van that we can paint, or a bus. I envision a small ‘Magic School Bus’ type bus that we painted and that is full of books,” Ban said. “That’s what I envision. And we want a song — kind of like the ice cream truck.”

“I think our biggest obstacle right now is finding vans,” Osborn said. “Our primary concern is that we make this project sustainable.”

“I expect it to be hard,” Grubb said. “We still have a lot of work…I’m sure the first time we try to get this going, it’s going to be hard to get excitement going … We really hope this becomes something [the kids] look forward and to be able to get more students volunteers to come and read with them.”

According to Osborn, the Bookmobile project will be tentatively implemented near the beginning to middle of spring semester. During that time, she and the other Bookmobile organizers plan to apply for grants to further sustain their initiative in the future. The Bookmobile group will continue to collect children’s book donations after winter break and encourages students to take that opportunity to bring back books from home. The donation boxes will be placed in Shane Lounge, McCabe Library and the top of Sharples.

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