Appeal to Donate Books to Bookery
ReadSA appeals to the public, appeals to you, to donate books to Equal Education‘s Bookery. Equal Education is in particular need of primary and high school books, non-fiction and reference books. All donated books should be in a satisfactory condition please. Any books in Afrikaans and in Xhosa are most welcome too, as are any other books.
Equal Education also needs assistance with helping the school libraries acquire Libwin Software, for cataloguing purposes. Volunteers are always welcome to help sort out and catalogue donated books.
Address to donate books: The Bookery 20 Roeland Street Cape Town. View a map.
From the building of school libraries to the giving of a book, Equal Education needs you in their community!
About Equal Education and Bookery
Equal Education is a community-based organisation. It is vigorously campaigning for quality and equality in the South African education system and we engage in evidence and research based activism for improving the nation’s schools. We promote the constitutional right to equality and education, with the firm belief that these will enable the poor and working class to an equal opportunity in life.
The campaign for School libraries. Only 8% of public schools in South Africa have functional libraries. These are almost entirely situated in former Model C schools, which continually have the resources to stock and staff these facilities. Approximately 20,000 schools are without libraries, thereby denying their learners access to regular reading opportunities.
The Bookery is the home of the Equal Education’s campaign for school libraries the slogan (1 school, 1 library, 1 librarian) was adopted for it, the campaign started in 2009. Most of the children in poor communities only have their first access to a reading book that they can take home and read for themselves in a school library.
Research shows that student performance increases by about 10% and 25% when a library space is adequately stocked, and properly staffed within a school.
The Bookery is where we collect books, sort them, cover and catalogue them to a computer software that allows the school to manage the books once they receive them.
We work on giving 3 books per learner “ if the school has 1000 learners they get 3000 books.”
From the moment we have identified the school we will work with as partners, the process takes 4 weeks until the opening of the library. We gather support and regularly visit and monitor the school library, until they are ready to take on the library on their own.
We have opened the 3 school libraries this year. We opened the first one in Khayelitsha Thembelihle High School, Lavender Hill High School in Retreat and our third was opened last Friday Masiyile Secondary Khayelitsha.
With thanks, Read South Africa and Equal Education.
