In October 2021 the Rotary Club of Newark honors our community partners who helped make this book distribution project a success!
 
 
Rotary members of Newark and their sorority partners extend literacy with the sorting and distribution of 40,000 free donated books to the community.
 
 
 
Where do we go from here we said to ourselves? These boxes of books had to be relocated to another space, unloaded, sorted and inventoried. What a job!
 
 
 
 
The Read4Life Project was a distribution of 40,000 assorted books donated by the estate of a Newark New Jersey book distributor. The books were transferred from the donator’s warehouse to office space donated by a local landlord to their building at 550 Broad Street, Newark, so that books could be unloaded, sorted, categorized and stacked, so that people and groups from the surrounding community could visit the site to take books to increase their reading pleasure. This visitation expanded to deliveries of larger donations to schools in both Newark and Trenton.
 
Many parties benefited from these donations. A sampling were students from the surrounding universities and high schools, community groups, charitable organization, charter schools in Newark and Trenton. The biggest benefactor was the Rotary Club of Newark as this project open many lines of communication and cooperation with the various community participants that volunteered their efforts with Rotarians in making this project successful.
 
Our Club’s mission this year was Literacy and this project expanded this goal. As noted above, many people and organization benefited from free donated book from Shakespeare to pop authors. Many people visiting the site took shopping bags of books with them, a table was set up for weeks with the Newark Downtown District Street Fairs again offering free books to the visitors. Cooperating organizations were many in this project, to name a few: Rutgers University, Friends of the Library, Essex County College, United Way-My Very Own Library Program, Audible, Secondary Parents Council, Newark Downtown District, I Have a Dream Foundation. Most importantly our senior partner in this project, Beta Alpha Omega Sorority, one of Newark’s oldest fraternal organizations and their members who actively volunteered on site. BAO also was the first financial contributor to the project. 
 
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