How To Forum

First things first - find local literacy locations and volunteers to help

Thu, 02/07/2008 - 21:59 — Bee Keeper

As shown in the 5 steps to KinderHarvest success, it's best to have your community"infrastructure" in place before collecting magazines - so, basically, the volunteers who will pick-up, sort, label, and deliver the magazines, and the list of organizations that would like to receive them. Running a local magazine collection can be a massive undertaking, but will go very smoothly if you know where you will be bringing the magazine you collect and have lots of help. Be on the lookout for great team leads.

The organizations should give an indication of the population served and the categories of magazines they would or would not be interested in. We are working on a web application for volunteers and organizations to sign-up and note their interests, but for now, it's being handled offline, so please keep track of the details. As you can imagine, people love to donate their magazines and the collections will grow very large, very quickly. So, its very important to identify as many agencies helping as many people as possible to keep the magazines flowing into the hands of new readers.

Also, it's important to count each magazine donated and delivered (title and issue), to measure of our overall impact and for our regulatory and financial reporting.

Once you are ready to set up collections, the possibilities are endless. Places that people frequent, such as coffee shops and grocery stores, schools, libraries, and churches are ideal locations. Schools and churches can also provide a ready volunteer force. Many churches are already involved in regular food collections for food pantries and will have relationships already with many community support agencies. Our magazine collections are very similar. Schools engage children and families and are a very good source for children's magazines, which are always in short supply. Consider helping us to the Whole Foods and Starbucks locations in your community. We have had great luck in these locations. For example, you could organize that Starbucks "summer reading" promotion in June, but again, you'll want to have our volunteers and literacy organizations set up first to distribute receive the magazines. You can also collect a steady stream of magazines from doctors, dentists, hair salons, and restaurants that receive new magazines each month and are happy to provide them, but want to have regular pick-ups.

When you are ready to get started, I'd like to add you as an blogger there, so you can chronicle the steps you are taking. This will help others to follow in your footsteps in their own communities.

Remember, you are changing the world, one magazine at a time!

Five easy steps for starting and running a kinderHarvest magazine recycling project

Fri, 09/28/2007 - 06:48 — Bee Keeper

Once you have permission to run your KinderHarvest magazine recycling effort, and group of friends or colleagues to help you, there are five easy steps. We want you to write about your KinderHarvest drive in this blog so you can inform and inspire others, so be sure to let us know if you want to do that:

1. FIND LITERACY NEEDS
Reach out to places that will take the magazines (e.g. food pantries; homeless shelters; domestic violence shelters; early learning or after-school programs; job training programs; senior centers, etc.). You can tell them that we have wonderful programs just like this taking magazines in places like San Francisco, Trenton NJ, and Boston. You can read about those efforts in this blog. Let us know the name and address of the agencies that will be taking magazines.

2. SET UP A COLLECTION BIN
Either create a collection bin of your choosing or raise funds (about $35 to purchase, plus about $15 to ship one of our wooden harvest bins. Decorate the bin so that it's attractive, informative, and fun. Send us photos of your bin or post them in your blog here.

3. COLLECT THE MAGAZINES
Publicize the collection and bin locations to your colleagues. Encourage the donation of recent, gently used magazines. It's best if donors don't tear off their mailing label. If it's a paper label, it should be gently removed. If it's printed on the magazine, then they should cross out their name and address. A new gift label will be put on top of the old label, so it will be covered up.

4. SORT AND LABEL THE MAGAZINES
Sort the magazines by category and put a MagazineLiteracy.org gift label on each one. There is a template on our website for printing them. Send us a count of the number of magazines collected by category. Be in touch for our list of categories.

5. DELIVER THE MAGAZINES
Some locations will take any type of magazine. Others will prefer certain categories. Send us a count of the number of magazines delivered to each location by category.

Organize a KinderHarvest Magazine Collection Like a Food Drive

Sat, 04/28/2007 - 13:22 — Bee Keeper

Find a program in your community to receive the magazines you collect. This could be a food pantry, a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, an early learning program like Headstart, or other after-school, reading, or literacy program. Find out how many people are served by the program, including their age, gender, and interests or needs in terms of the types of magazines. There are many online and community directories for these programs. Please be in touch if you need help finding programs to receive the magazines that you collect.
Collect recent issues of gently used magazines. Think of collection [img_assist|nid=62|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=171|height=177]points that are convenient for your neighbors - places where people go on a regular and frequent basis, such as the public library, a book or magazine store, a school, church, bank, or supermarket. Ask permission to set up a KinderHarvest magazine literacy collection bin. Think about where else you could collect recent magazines. For example, perhaps a supermarket would allow a magazine drive, which is very similar to a food drive. Shoppers receive a small flyer on the way into the grocery store announcing the magazine drive and can drop newly purchased magazines in a bin or cart on the way out of the store. Consumers can be encouraged to come back to drop-off their recent issues of magazines from home.
Remove labels from magazines, or use a black permanent marker to
[img_assist|nid=26|title=Label a Child|desc=|link=url,http://magazineliteracy.org/?tp=ideas#label|align=left|width=100|height=35]blot out names and addresses. Then, print and post our magazine gift label in the same spot where the old label was. This protects the magazine donor's privacy, while giving the magazine to someone as something they can call their very own.
Deliver the magazines that you collect to the receiving program on a timely basis. Gather feedback from the program director so we can improve and grow the KinderHarvest program. Communicate what you are planning or what you have accomplished to the local media, so that others will learn about, support, and be inspired by your good work.
Contact us to let us know if you would write about the planning, organization, and execution of your project in our MagazineLiteracy.org ideas blog. This will also help to inspire and guide others who would like to organize a successful KinderHarvest magazine collection in their own school or community.

Here is what has worked for me: See if a nearby supermarket or pharmacy with a good magazine collection that includes children's magazines, or a bookstore or newsstand will let you do a magazine drive. Explain it's like a food drive where you'll give a small flyer to [img_assist|nid=29|title=Get magazines into the hands, homes, and hearts of children and families in food pantry grocery bags.|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=140|height=147]each shopper on the way into the store and they will deposit the magazine purchase on the way out. You can ask the shoppers to focus on kids magazines for your students, but if they give others, those can always go home to the children's families. I am basing this magazine drive idea on having very successful food drives for over 20 years - always in the same way. It started one day when I went to a food pantry with empty shelves in 1986. I wondered, how could I fill those shelves quickly? So, I stood in front of a supermarket for a weekend and collected 2,000 pounds of food. I've kept them up ever since - once or twice a year. Basically, I ask a supermarket manager if I can do the drive (2 out of 3 say yes). Then I plan to spend the day at [img_assist|nid=28|title=25+ Carts of Groceries in a Single Day! Imagine how many magazines you can collect.|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=224|height=165]the store, or, if friends or colleagues are helping, we take two-hour shifts. The key is a smile and eye-to-eye contact with each shopper on the way in the store. A large number of people will purchase one or more items. I've collected as much as 25 full grocery carts in a single day. Often, shoppers express how much they want to help and how much they appreciate the convenience of the collection effort.

For the flyer handout, I like a 4 per page format (folded from top to bottom and then left to right) for food drives because 500 copies turns into 2,000 flyers. However, for magazines, a "bookmark" shape might make more sense. That's a landscape sheet of paper folded twice from left to right. I like yellow paper because it stands out like a shopping list, but any bright color works fine. Feel free to copy any graphics off our website, such as the logo and the KinderHarvest recycling logo.

Tips for Starting a KinderHarvest Magazine Collection in your School

Sat, 04/28/2007 - 12:31 — Bee Keeper

There are two sides to a KinderHarvest magazine collection:
1. finding agencies that need the magazines.
2. the magazine collection itself.

Step 1: Identify the Literacy Need
A good match is collecting magazines for a nearby food pantry or homeless shelter. It's best to know where the magazines will go first, as well as how many children and adults receive services (e.g. the number of families that get a bag of groceries from a food pantry, or beds used at a shelter each week; also, the approximate number of children and adults served, and the general demographics, such as gender counts). This will allow you to set goals for the magazine drive and to target the drive to meet specific needs. If you can identify one or more agencies that will use the magazines, that would be great. If needed, we can help with that.

Step 2: Collect Magazines
Your students could then bring in "gently used," recent issues of magazines - this way, the children and families will receive current magazines to read and enjoy. Your class could also be the HQ for a magazine collection throughout the school. As part of the project, perhaps students could craft a note or artwork to include with each magazine. This could be a one time event or repeated as time allows.

Why Gently Used?
One of the essential tenets of our magazine literacy program is for children and families, who cannot otherwise obtain their own magazines, to enjoy the same experience as others when their subscriptions arrive in the mail with their name on the address label - that feeling we get when we open our own mailboxes, when the only thing that matters is finding the next issue of our favorite magazine.

Step 3: Label the Magazines
The at-risk children and families we serve have few possessions, and [img_assist|nid=26|title=Label a Child|desc=|link=url,http://magazineliteracy.org/?tp=ideas#label|align=left|width=100|height=35]in the places we reach them - in homeless and domestic violence shelters, they usually arrive with no possessions. So affixing a label to their magazine gift instills a sense of ownership, pride, and self-esteem - the label makes it something they can call their own - "my own magazine." The magazine is very important, but it's their name on the label that makes the magazine their property. So that tiny label creates tremendous value. We have label templates you can use on our website.

Step 4: Count and Deliver your Magazines
Collecting magazine puts smiles on the faces of donors and volunteers. The greatest smiles will be on the faces of teachers and other literacy agents and the children and families who receive them. Keep track and report how many magazines you collect and distribute for our national tally.

We can set you up with a blog here to tell your story and to post photes so others can learn from your experience. Or, send us information and photos, which we will post on our web site as an example for others. Be sure to follow your school's policies for photo release.

Here are links to more information about KinderHarvest:
http://magazineliteracy.org/?tp=kinderharvest
http://magazineliteracy.org/blog/?cat=16

Steps for organizing your magazines - Sort, Label, Pack, Deliver to New Readers!

Fri, 10/03/2008 - 20:50 — Bee Keeper

Here's a diagram you can share with a group of volunteers helping to sort and package your recycled magazines for delivery to new readers.

Why it's important to remove mailing labels from magazines without tearing the magazine cover.

Thu, 04/24/2008 - 19:56 — Bee Keeper

Our preference is to deliver magazines with their covers intact, so we'd rather not tear the cover to remove mailing labels. It's a more dignified experience for the new readers to receive the whole magazine. However, we need to protect the privacy of donors, so we remove old paper labels or black out ink mailing labels with a permanent marker. Then we apply a new literacy "gift" label to cover the area where the old one was. The new label also helps to instill a sense of magazine ownership to the new reader that helps to reinforce their self-esteem. There is label template on our web site here:

http://magazineliteracy.org/?tp=ideas#label

Things to consider when collecting magazines for your school library

Fri, 08/10/2007 - 06:58 — Bee Keeper

Will you be coordinating the effort yourself or with a team, or will there first need to be an individual or group that can coordinate this on your behalf? It makes sense to put a team together representative of the teachers and parents in your school.
Let us set up the point of contact for your KinderHarvest literacy drive in this Literacy Bee blog to record an account of the steps being taken to define and to meet your needs. That will chronicle the effort, create a repository of information that your school and community can tap into, and provide guidance and inspiration for others with similar needs in communities across the U.S.
Define your needs specifically so they can be communicated to the community. For example, how many copies of which magazines would you like to have on the shelves of your school library? How many children are at each grade level, and at each reading-age level in your school, that would benefit from having their own copies of magazines? Are older issues of magazines useful, or would there be limitation to just more recent issues of magazines? The KinderHarvest effort would proceed to meet your goals. Of course the needs and goals could change over time, but you'll want an initial target.
Next, you'll organize the magazine collections. You'll need volunteers for this and especially to pick-up and deliver the magazines to the school on a regular basis.
In addition to KinderHarvest, consider finding business and other sponsors in the community who would fund sets of new magazines for your school library.

Tips for handling, labeling, and sorting magazines for delivery

Sun, 07/29/2007 - 23:15 — Bee Keeper

Here's a few tips and easy steps for labeling and sorting your magazines for delivery:

If you have a large quantity of magazines, find a community meeting room in a school or library to label and sort your magazines.
Magazines are heavy, and moving them around is hard work. Keep the load light. Only lift what you can.
Be respectful of your meeting location and clean up when you're done.

Here some easy steps to get your magazines ready for delivery to children and families.

Gather your supplies - magazines, of course, literacy gift labels, and permanent markers to blackout existing mailing labels...

... and paper grocery bags are handy to package magazines for delivery to shelters, food pantries, and other literacy programs.

Carefully tear off paper labels and replace them with literacy gift labels. This protects the privacy of the magazine donor and gives the new reader a magazine they can call their own.

If the existing mailing information is printed directly on the magazine, blackout the information and cover that with a literacy gift label.

Sort your magazines by title, and type.

Package the sorted magazines in grocery bags for easy delivery to agencies helping new readers.

Adding links to your blog post and other formatting tips.

Tue, 05/08/2007 - 07:23 — Bee Keeper

You can do basic HTML formatting to add links to your blog entries, or to emphasize text or to add indents, bullets, or numbering.

Magazine Literacy Bee

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