Derby Book Festival: 6000 donated books for Children across Derby!

A huge thank you to everyone who helped our Children’s Book Appeal at our Summer Festival by either donating, hosting a collection point or helping us sort books. You have helped make a significant change for so many children across Derby!

Over the last month, Derby Book Festival and partners across Derby have been working together to make reading for pleasure more accessible in Derby.

This has enabled us to continue our support for the National Year of Reading as we ensure children’s books are given to families who need help to access books.

We received an incredible 6000 books from 16 Derby Primary schools and 8 Derby organisations, meaning that thousands of children and families will be able to take these books to their own home and keep.

Across our Summer Festival, people donated books at a range of collection points, which were then collected by the amazing team at Enterprise, who provided the vehicles, and the Derby Book Festival Team. We were then joined by brilliant volunteers from Atkins Realis, Balfour Beatty, Derby Rotary, The University of Derby Library Team, Vaillant Live, Global Legends and our Festival team who helped us with sorting, quality checking and packing the books.

Finally 24 schools and projects from around Derby collected these boxes filled with joy to be distributed to their new homes.

Once the books are in their new homes, children across the city can choose which books they would like either from school libraries, community libraries, free book stalls, gifts and prizes. This enables us to put books into the hands of the next generation of readers.

We are incredibly grateful to all of the amazing partners who support this project and make reading more accessible.

Partners across the city have been hosting collection points for book donations, receiving books from members of the public, festival goers and employees, we had over 20 collection points across Derby!

A huge thank you to: Derbion, Wathalls Funerals, Moorways Sports Village, Derby City Lab, Morley Hayes Hotel, QUAD Derby, LGH Derby Mickleover Hotel, Holiday Inn Derby – Riverlights, Valiant Live, University of Derby, Cosy Direct, Pektron, Rolls Royce Group (five locations), Atkins Realis, Mott Macdonald, Balfour Beatty, Rotary Derby, Repton Prep, Trent College, Weston on Trent Primary School, Derby High School, Derby Cathedral School and The Bemrose School.

A massive thank you to the team at Enterprise for their special help for supplying vans and a team for collecting the books from around Derby.

With their vans we managed to collect books from our collections points across Derby, take them to the sorting site for our brilliant volunteers to sort and pack them, and then deliver them to their new homes.