Vietnam Book Drive at PennMoves 2015
Dear all,
In May 2015, the Vietnam Book Drive project held a meaningful event of book collection at The University of Pennsylvania. It was the first collaborative activity of The Vietnam Book Drive with PennMoves, the University of Pennsylvania's Move-Out collection and donation program coordinated by the staff and students at Residential Services.
Within a month of PennMoves, VnBookDrive received a total of 1,871 donated books. This was a considerably large number of books that were given a brand-new and meaningful mission: to contribute to the path of knowledge expansion for the students in Vietnam.
Below is a photo diary entry following this special event. We hope you’d enjoy it!
On Feb 20th--four months ago, the Vietnam Book Drive project submitted an application to partner with PennMoves.
Ms. Karema Saliem, one of our generous supporters at Upenn Engineering Book Drive, had connected the two organizations as she wrote the primary introduction for VnBookDrive to PennMoves. Within the past six months, Ms. Karema has organized two Book Swap activities for students at UPenn School of Engineering. VnBookDrive, fortunately, was a final book recipient organization. Ever since our collaborative campaigns, thanks to Ms. Karema, VnBookDrive has built a strong connection with the Upenn community, as we all share a good cause of extending life and usefulness of good books to those in need.
At the beginning of March 2015, VnBookDrive was officially chosen to be a partner of PennMoves, who back then had been organizing all book donations at moving out season at University of Pennsylvania. In the photo below, Mr. Joel Mintzer, an enthusiastic and supportive organizer of PennMoves was meeting with our VnBookDrive representative at the campus, Ms. Thu Duong, to coordinated for the event.
In this picture, PennMoves’ standees were promoting the Vietnam Book Drive Project to the community at The University of Pennsylvania.
Book Drop-off Boxes were set up at different locations all around the campus. We had just conceived a new life mission for the recyclable carton boxes, which was to store more and more books. 🙂
And here is Mr. Timothy Wells--a staff at the Penn Biomedical Library, who generously helped us set up a Drop-off Box inside the library, so that students can easily drop off their books and support our project!
During May 11th to May 13th and May 18th to May 19th , our tent was up at two most-traffic locations in Upenn campus - the Quadrangle and Locus Walk. All was ready and set to accept book donations from students and professors.
Thanks to the support of 22 volunteers from Drexel University, Bryn Mar College, Neumann University, and the University of Pennsylvania, we happily ran the event with success. We are tremendously grateful to everyone, every student and staff who has lent us a hand during this important event.
A new addition to our campaign program this year: we were gifting donors and supporters of VnBookDrive with a specicial treat from Vietnam—little aromatic packets of Trung Nguyen coffee. With these gifts, we hoped to bring freshness and inspiration to their mind as well as a warm taste of Vietnam to the community, as a way to say our thank-yous for all your help and support.
At mid-day, we brought Vietnamese food to replenish our volunteers’ energy.
Books were being donated from all different walks of the campus…
In the evening, we started transferring books out of the campus. With a sheer hand truck borrowed from the BRB mailing room, the books felt extremely heavy. Nevertheless we were always smiling because of the excitement about the prospect of when the books would reach Vietnam and the impact they would create for the community there.
Then we had our diligent drivers who contributed their mileages for the longer transport of the books to a local storage.
At the end of each day at PennMoves, we were a happy book movers team, happy and satisfied with the results of our labor, yet still with full energy even though we had to work hard at night.
Our initial book sorting showed that out of all donations that we received, 458 books belonged to STEM fields and Business field while the rest, 1,413 books, fell into a variety of other fields such as history, philosophy, sociology, language, fiction, non-fiction, design, political science.
Here is a sneak view at a storage location in Philadelphia where donated books were being stored safely. Parts of those books will be sent to our 2015 Annual Book Day at Texas from where they’d travel—through much longer distance, to Duy Tan University in Danang. The rest will be sent directly from Philadelphia to Vietnam in an upcoming project of Vietnam Book Drive to save domestic shipping cost.
Finally, great and warm thanks to PennMoves organizers, everyone at the University of Pennsylvania and all of our kind volunteers and book donors, VnBookDrive had a great event of books collection to transport more up-to-date knowledge to Vietnam. Thank you ALL.
There is a photo album of VnBookDrive at PennMoves on our official facebook page. Please visit it at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.780819382036283.1073741835.241396569311903&type=3
