Free library.

Gobs of them around here...

David Weaver

..not sure who started it, but they showed up in county parks, and then they just started showing up all over the place.

My neighborhood (we have a small nonbinding association and a small privately owned park that's open to the public) won a free one from some place, and decided they'd like to have two, but one larger than the one they won, so I built them one about a year and a half ago.

The ladies in the park needed a girl scout project, so they filled the sides of it in with a tile mosaic. Like the non-sentimental person that I am, I have no pictures of it, but they are great for two things:

* getting something to read when you're bored

* offloading your old books instead of throwing them out

We have two so that one can be for kids and one for adults (makes it easier for the kids).

There are literally private yards with them at the edge of the property in the city.

One of ours was vandalized already, but they're not that hard to fix if someone just breaks something on them (instead of painting them or some such thing).

Re: Free library.

Howard in Toronto

Those libraries are always a great contribution to any neighbourhood.

In my own case, throwing books out would be very hard for me. We donate books, mags and lots of other household stuff to our closest Salvation Army branch.

Their structure is based on their religious beliefs. But they are completely non-sectarian when it comes to the help they provide. They do mountains of good work with society's most vulnerable members.

Howard

Donations....

David Weaver

...Libraries here won't take books (they are casting off the stuff we are already calling "good").

We don't have a salvation army nearby, but we do have a goodwill up the road. The mrs and I used to collect things with a little bit of remaining economic value and drop them off there until we dropped something off one day and asked the guy how they can manage to find buyers for most of what we drop off.

He said "to be honest, most of what you're dropping off will probably get thrown out. We have to throw out most of the donations given to us because they're just not valuable enough to sell".

Our local area has more donors than buyers, and books would get pitched.

Different story with our church - whatever is donated gets directed somewhere (but you can't just give them whatever you want, they have certain things they can manage). I've found over time with them that they don't really make a value judgement on things, and I think it's intentional, because they're often dealing with folks who are really down and out and have nothing at all.

Re: Donations....

JL

Some of the stuff that doesn't sell at Goodwill and other places get placed in a container and shipped overseas.

The daughter of a friend works as a missionary in the Philippines. She has seen the containers dropped off at the mission headquarters - and has helped sort for distribution to the various sites.

So if you are wondering how the heck that a Metallica t-shirt ended up in a remote village....