New York City: Books Through Bars

Welcome! 

We are Group 4 in Professor Yonkers Conference and Group Leadership course at the University at Albany. The members of our group are: Celia Balf, Ajon Crump, Zach Cook, Janice Johnson, Camy Liang and Olivia O’Neil. We are all communications majors or minors at The University at Albany who have come together to organize a book drive through the Student Association on campus. Individually we have challenged ourselves to collect four books to donate to the book drive which will eventually be given to the Books Through Bars organization.

Mission Statement: We are working with The University at Albany Student Association to organize a book drive in which we will encourage the university community to donate as many books as possible to then donate to New York City’s Books Through Bars, where they donate books to prisoners throughout the nation.

Ajon Crump is the Director of Programming for the Student Association. She has been in contact with SA to help us organize a campus wide book drive where we can gather a large amount of books to then donate to Books Through Bars in New York City. The book drive is open to the public for donation until April 24th. The Student Association will donate the collected books to Books Through Bars by April 28th.This book drive is a way for our group to look beyond the classroom for help. It encourages the local community to participate in something greater, which in this case is the Books Through Bars Organization.

Below is a link to NYC Books Through Bars Organization, as well as Student Association's website.

Books Through Bars

Student Association 

 Books Through Bars Facebook Page

Amherst Town Library Book Donation

Mission Statement: We are working with the Amherst Town Library, in Amherst New Hampshire to donate 25 books, which will then be sent to other libraries in need.

We are group #2 in Professor Yonkers Leadership and Group Conferencing course at the University of Albany.  Our group members include: Jenna Frederick, Zach Kraham, Sal DeVito, Angeline Lau, and Lauren Montera.  We are all juniors and seniors here at the University of Albany and this blog has been created to represent our book project.  Our goal for this project is to have each group member collect 5 books to then donate to a location of our choice.

We are working with the Amherst Town Library to donate books that will then be sent to other libraries in need.  We chose to work with this library because we have a direct contact there.  One of our group members, Zach, has a family member who works at the library.  This has made contacting the library directly easy for our group and we will not have any problems delivering the books because we can give them to our contact directly.

Click here for a link to the Amherst Town Library website.

Group Photo:

Bay Shore Brightwaters Public Library

Hello, we are group 7, Karl, Naun, Chelsea, Shanice, and Walter, from the Leadership Communication class at the University at Albany.

A picture of the library we chose to send our books to is at the end of our blog. The location of the library is in Bay Shore, New York. There is also a link in the blog that will bring you directly to the website for the library where you can learn more about it. The reason we chose this library was because the transportation of our books will be fairly easy. Being that one of our members in the group is from this town and has a direct relationship with the library, he will be able to bring them directly to the library.

We plan to collect and donate 25 books to this library. We each started off with one book and it is our responsibility to each obtain the other four books needed. Collectively we decided on this library because we felt this was the most convenient way for our books to impact many people in the area. We wanted to be able to give to a lot of organizations in the beginning so we were thinking of sending books to more than one organization. When we came together it made more sense to send it to a library that a lot of people visit and would be able to use our books. When speaking with the library for the first time they told us they collect any donations as long as the books are in good condition. It is our main objective to obtain books in top condition so the library will be able to use them regularly and for years to come.


Bay Shore Brightwaters Public Library