Spreading our Wings

I just got some really brilliant news.
For years I have been puzzling about what to do with all the German books we are given. No-one in the Netherlands seems to be interested. I have taken some to the UK but the one person who finds homes for them there has been somewhat overwhelmed with the quantities.

This evening a German friend living in the Netherlands said that she had just called a friend who was thinking ot setting up something similar. So who knows, we may even have a branch of Borderline Books in Germany in the next few months.

I am also working on friends in Belgium to do the same....

Meanwhile, the project in Groningen has already donated several hundred books in the provinces of Groningen and Friesland and will gradually spread to more of the northern provinces. They are also working on a project whereby they will make and lend specially designed bookshelves. - Photos soon.

I'm working on a new web design and hope that will be online in the next few weeks - in the meantime the existing site has all the information - just looking a little raggedy after 5 years.

We have also joined UnLtdWorld to assist with networking in the UK.
Don't forget - Borderline Books is built to be a portable project. If you think it would fit in with something you are doing, get in touch and we can help you get things up and running.

Refugee Week and after

Refugee Week has been and gone. We had a table at the Civic Centre in Newcastle on June 19 and did our best to make it attractive by wrapping books in pretty paper and putting labels on with the names of the organisations we have given books to in the last couple of years.
Somehow we thought that the judges for the best stands were the visitors to the event, but it seems we were all supposed to vote for each other. Never mind, better luck next year.
The positive part was that we renewed contact with a number of projects we met last year and have now added the Pakistan Cultural Society, Open Door, Acane and the Comfrey Project to our list of recipients.

The Comfrey Project has three allotments in Newcastle and Gateshead where refugees can come to practice their gardening skills, learn about growing vegetables, fruit and flowers, or simply enjoy a few hours in the open air with friends. I went to the allotment in Felling with a couple of boxes of books to be shared between the three locations. - Seeing people cry out in joy at finding books in their first languages - Arabic, Farsi, Pashto - was hugely rewarding. Books with photos of Iraq and Afghanistan were studied with interest, and not a little sadness as they portrayed these countries 25 years ago, long before they had been bombed by the Americans and the British. I hope to spend more time close to the earth with this delightful group of people.

The Pakistan Cultural Society also invited me to come to some of their events, including a poetry reading in August. This promises to be a wonderful event with poets from many parts of the world.

This week Borderline Books has given away close to 600 books in total. Apart from those already mentioned, the recipients were Direct Access, with whom we hope to work more closely in the future, Shelter, Crisis, Open Door and Acane, an organisation of African refugees in Byker.

At the end of the week we will be sending another 100 or so books on their way to a school we have been supporting in Kenya. Anyone who knows the principles of Borderline Books knows that we tend to give priority to people living in the countries where we operate - currently the Netherlands and the UK. The main reason for this is simply that there are many organisations who work to send books and other items to countries in Africa and Asia, but few who concentrate on giving similar items to the Africans and Asians who are our direct neighbours. Nonetheless, we never refuse books to people who are travelling to other countries and wish to fill their suitcases with words.

We do our best....

Take two

I wrote a new blog a few days ago and it disappeared into some sort of black hole, so here we go again.

January was fairly quiet after a bumper Christmas in the UK. In February, however, we took 1000 books to Groningen and another 600 a week later. We are hoping that a new BookSpace will be created there and that the project will be used as a work-activity at the 12de Huis, a organization supporting drug-users.
It would be wonderful if a project could be built up to supply books to organizations in the provinces of Groningen and Friesland. Since we fist started with Borderline Books we have tried to build up contacts in Groningen as it is twinned with Newcastle upon Tyne. Now that things are up and running in Newcastle it has been wonderful to see the Groningen contacts begin to flower.

On 26 February we also took part in the Winter Festival organized by Libertas in Leiden. On Thursday 26th we were open to the public for the entire day. We had around 50 visitors, amazed that we had such a huge variety of books and that for one day only, they too could choose books for themslves. After all the effort we have put in over the past 7 years it was interesting to see that none of the visitors appeared to have heard about the project. That will change now and we hope that we may also get some new volunteers.

We had another visit from Leger des Heils (Salvation Army) in Den Haag. Their clients are always happy to spend a couple of hours browsing the bookshelves and they took a new supply of books for their drop-in centre. We are still working on a plan to cooperate on the creation of a BookSpace in Den Haag. There are probably thousands of book-hungry people in that city and we have long cherished the idea of getting something up and running there.

Next target: Nijmegen! We are planning a meeting with Rutger Kips, another of the nominees for the Ab Harrewijn prize last year, to see if we can work together to create another BookSpace on the opposite side of the country from Leiden.

Our total outflow in February was almost 2000 books. We need more months like this!

We expect to need to move from our current location in Leiden within the next few months, so it is imperative that we build up more projects around the country to make the books available to those in need. Suggestions welcome, help welcome, funds welcome.

We'll keep you posted.

Year end and New Year

This period is always busy for us. The weekend before Christmas we brought books to the St Vincent de Paul Christmas dinner for the third year in succession. This time we brought some used clothes along as well as books. In addition we took books to Crisis Skylight, Womens Aid Newcastle and WA Gateshead, North East Direct Access, the Barnardo's organisation for teenagers in Whitley Bay, The Base and in the new year also to Shelter, Newcastle. In all we gave away between 600 and 700 books during this period.

We are particularly pleased to have made a number of contacts within Shelter and hope to build on this in order to provide books for Shelter clients across the country.

The general plan for 2009 is to build on our contacts in the UK, while easing the Dutch side of the project into other hands. The contrast between the ways in which Borderline Books is received in the two countries is huge. While in the Netherlands it has taken 7 years to build up a handful of regular recipients, in the UK the project is welcomed with open arms. Very often this has led to the organisations building on that first book donation to create their own libraries.

The Borderline Books dream is that the project should be dynamic and inspiring and open doors to new ideas and creative projects.
We continue to pursue that dream.

Refugee Week in UK

What a great week; a celebration of the contribution refugees have made and are making to society in Britain. After all the bad press it is so refreshing to see articles in the Sunday Observer and other newspapers and magazines and events up and down the country - see Refugee Week.
This site lists just some of the events going on, but certainly gives an idea of the wide range of ways people find to pay respect to the refugees in their area. There are conferences, discussions groups, concerts, food tastings, films and cultural exchanges.

Borderline Books attended an afternoon in Middlesbrough held by the Hope Foundation which supports people with literacy and numeracy, computer lessons and plenty of advice and information for local asylum applicants. We took books in French and English together with posters, cards and stickers from our friends UNITED. The great thing is that the Hope Foundation decided that they want to set up a multilingual library and today was the start of that project. This is so encouraging, and the third project to which we have given books who have decided to use our donation as the basis for their own library.
There are a number of events happening in Newcastle this week. We will having an information stand at the event at the Civic Centre on Friday and the Northern Conference Against Racism on Saturday at the University of Northumberland and may get to some of the other happenings as well.
We do finally have a prototype new English flyer. Prototype in that the production was not quite up to scratch, but it was a rush job and we got a huge discount, so I suppose we shouldn't complain!

Boo Hoo

Well, we didn't win top prize today. Didn't really expect to either and the project we thought would win did win. I can't help having a twinge of disappointment though.

Still, I hope that at least we made some good contacts and that we can move ahead a bit with getting books out in Nijmegen and Leeuwarden where two of the other nominees came from. I had actually written to each one of them offering books, but all said they didn't get the mail. Don't tell me I used a dirty word in the mail and it got into the spam box! - Yes, a word like 'free' often gets me in trouble.

Femke Halsema (Green left politician who gave a speech at the prize giving) thinks it's a good project, so that's nice. One of the jury members works with Exodus (organization helping former prisoners)in Amsterdam and will remind them they can get books, so that's positive too.

Surprising lack of press. I mean just no-one except one woman doing a profile of one of the nominees.

Ah well, tomorrow's another day.
Oh lord, tomorrow, a meeting, got a whole heap of work to do tonight.

At the risk of repeating myself...

Thinking over that radio interview and the various 'portraits' made of Borderline Books in the past, I have to say that there is so much more to it than books. I have always wanted to set up small 'BookSpaces' in different towns where, with books as the one constant, a space is created for social exchange. Perhaps one would become a cafe, another would host language classes and poetry evenings - whatever the people using it at the time wanted.

Ideally (and yes I'm an incurable idealist) the initiative would be taken by the users and people would come to help each other. In the years I've been doing this I have noticed that the people with the least are the ones more likely to be looking out for books for their friends or family. Years ago we had a visit from a group of men recently released from prison and trying to get used to being on the outside. They were extremely polite. One asked me - that book is in the display, I don't suppose I could have that one... - Yes, of course you can. And then, My father's really interested in cycling, could I take a book for him? (I believe it was on the Tour de France)... and again, yes of course.

Through listening to people as they look through the books we learn so much more about what they are looking for and can lend a hand or put them in contact with other organizations who can help.