Sweet Home turns out town for First Book
Sweet Home Chapter 3’s First Book drive was a massive success, with 40,000 new, high-quality books now available to local schools and students.
The drive, which started with the chapter gathering 2,000 signatures with help from Lane County Head Start Chapter 600, culminated in a two-day event during which the nonprofit First Book delivered a truck full of books to the Sweet Home High School gym. A host of volunteers sorted and stacked books for community members to pick up the next day.
Two thousand signatures is a lot for any chapter to gather — perhaps even more so when you consider this small town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains has a population of just less than 9,000.
Chapter President Velma Canfield and Zone III Director Lisa Gourley were the co-captains of the ship, and they didn’t let the numbers intimidate them. They stood outside every event they could think of, talked to every media outlet in the area, contacted area churches and charities, hit up parents and beat the pavement to get the signatures and volunteers needed to make the event a success. Canfield, who works as a media assistant in the district, found peers in each school who could gather signatures and email addresses.
“I wanted them to have ownership in this,” Canfield said. “A whole group of people worked really hard as a group to make this happen.”
It seemed like nearly every single resident was at the Sweet Home High School gym on May 20 to help sort books. OSEA organizers and members who had worked on First Book drives before also showed up on the event days and during the planning process.
Some people came to learn how they could pull off such a success in their own district.
“It’s layers of conversations and actions by individuals to coordinate a planned outreach,” Gourley said. “It really is acting on those plans and being willing to revise and rework and keep pushing until you get the job done.”
For Gourley, the true satisfaction comes with seeing students in the halls reading books they acquired through the First Book drive. This has encouraged her to read along with them and join in the discussion.
“They have been independently discussing plots, settings, characters and aspects of their personal reading progress with one another,” Gourley said. “It is undeniably a turning point for many of our students.”
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