Busy Month......

June has been Volunteer's Month in Gateshead. Our volunteer, John Harlock, braved the weather and took a table full of books to Trinity Square on 7 June for the opening event. Pam Gibson went to the Teams Festival on 14 June -this is our third Teams Festival. On Sunday 29th we had a table at the Bensham and Saltwell festival for the first time. - So far we gave away 288 books at these 3 events.
On 5 July we will be at Dunston and on 19 July at Birtley and also at a Salvation Army event in Gateshead..... so let's see if we can keep up the momentum!

On June 20 - World Refugee Day we held an event at our Team Valley location. In the morning there was a presentation by Hannah from GVOC about the latest regulations regarding refugees, asylum applicans and volunteering. In short, they can all volunteer as restrictions have been lifted. This is excellent news as volunteering offers such a good opportunity for people to join in, meet new people, learn the language better and generally spend what may be a worrying and frustrating time doing enjoyable tasks. Thanks to GVOC for a very interesting presentation with lots of space for questions and explanations.

Lunch was provided by Culture Kitchen - and delicious it was too, with dishes from Angola, Poland and other countries which all blended together to make a wonderful meal.
We are looking forward to working with Culture Connect on other projects in the future.... again, wait and see!

In the afternoon Freedom from Torture gave a talk and showed short films about the fate of some people who suffer torture in different countries around the world. Look at their website for more information.

The mini-bus was provided by Community Transport in Byker - big thanks to Dave who patiently drive back and forth hoping for more passengers. Nexus kindly gave us permission to run the shuttle service from inside the Gateshead Interchange. And finally, thanks to Gateshead Council for funding for this event. It was very much appreciated. 

In the meantime, summer is around here somewhere, the bees are buzzing and so are our minds, hatching new plots and planning new ventures. We hope to be able to announce progress on the multi-lingual library very soon... we are collecting bi-lingual books, particularly for children, as well as flags from all corners of a spherical planet.

And while we're here - with all these summer festivals our supply of children's picture books is running very low, so if you have any children's books your children have finished with, or know of any schools who are clearing out their libraries, please let them know we would be delighted to give them a home.

Some updates.....

There's so much going on at the moment there never seems to be time to update this blog....
The website has been updated - on the English side, anyway, www.borderlinebooks.org

Wordplay is the new literacy project we will be running with young people to find out what's stopping them enjoying reading or writing. The main component of the course will be lots of fun and laughter. there's a Facebook page which will keep you up to date. We have funding for the pilot project and are particularly interested in working with young offenders.

Next, we are looking for groups working with people leaving prison to start up new Borderline Books branches around the country to make books more readily available to people who need them.

We'd like to thank the children and staff at Moorside Primary School who made a collection for us on World Book Day in March. They came to school dressed as a character from a book and were asked to bring a silver coin. We were amazed that they sent us more than £100!  Thank you SO much Moorside!


And the other exciting thing is that we are going to open a Multi-Lingual Library in Newcastle.... When? Where? We'll tell you next time....

Meanwhile we've applied for some funding at last.... We've been managing since 2009 with what people drop in the donations box, together with a fundraising poetry night in 2012 and an open day in 2014... now and then people promise donations and then forget to take care of the crucial business of actually giving it to us.  We spend as little as possible, but the volunteers need their travel costs, we have to pay to use the phone and internet and the flyers and other printed materials are not free. The library is going to cost quite a bit to set up, regardless of the cost of the new location. Again we were promised shelving which accidentally got given to someone else :-( so we're buying from ebay... and that's not free either.

Here we are in 2014

Wow, that didn't take long.....  Let's start with a quick look back at what we did in 2013...

At the end of April we held our first Open Day. We had our first BBC tv spot. Our first BBC Newcastle interview.
We took part in Gateshead Volunteers month, attending festivals in Saltwell Park, Birtley and Teams. We had at least 4 mass-volunteering days where we accomplished large amounts of work and pretty much cleared up the backlog.
In June we took part in a pilot project at Broadacre House with Northern Creative Solutions.
In December we put book-collection boxes at Seven Stories and Gateshead Civic Centre.
The Score:
Seven Stories: 19      Civic Centre 180

We also once again received items of clothing from Giving World Online 
These were distributed to various women's refuges, The Comfrey Project, Panah, Crisis and other local groups. - We do encourage you to sign up with Giving World, they always have interesting things on offer and if we group the orders together we can save a lot on transport costs.

We also received some wonderful donations of books from North Shields and Wallsend libraries - many many thanks to them. It is wonderful to have this support from people who value books the way we do. Many of the library workers were also delighted that their books would go on to have another lease of life, rather than sending them to the knacker's yard and getting pulped.

During 2013 we gave away approx 5183 books, plus DVDs, clothes, oracles, card decks and other goodies.

Looking forward, during 2014 we hope to open a multi-lingual library in Newcastle City centre, start up at least 3 more Borderline BookSpaces in Durham, Carlisle and .... fill in your local town.
We are already working on more active outreach to stop people complaining that they've never heard of us...

We plan to take part in Gateshead Volunteers Month in June again, remembering that the third week of June is also Refugee Week, so we may be able to hold some special events that week in Team Valley.

Also we would like to offer some extras to women's refuges - perhaps 'pamper days' where we can visit the refuges with people who do hair, nails, reiki.... whatever people have to offer and the women will enjoy. Of course we would also take quantities of books to let the women choose for themselves what they'd like to read.

So it's wide open - bring your own ideas, let us know what you can offer. All our contact details are on our website.

It's hard to believe this blog hasn't been updated since March - so much has been happening.

First there was the Open Day in April which brought lots of new faces in to visit our Team Valley BookSpace. It also brought in Hannah Bayman and her team from the BBC who arrived just as we were about to begin the programme.... they hadn't warned us they were coming so they got a somewhat mixed reception. Eventually a short report was shown at Breakfast time, while we were all watching for it in the evening.  But the Open Day itself was great, with poetry from Pippa Little, Catherine Graham, short stories from Shelley Day Sclater, an auction, a raffle and a fantastic slap-up meal - more about that on the website.

More recently we arranged for Julian Miles from BBC Newcastle to drop in and make an interview. that was a lot of fun and, well, I'm not sure if it's aired yet or not.....

We had a visit from the Gateshead Young Women's Outreach who excelled themselves going through boxes of books in a huge variety of languages - sorting them by language and stamping them - big thanks for that!

The Birtley Hug brought a few visitors over from their coffee morning and we may perhaps have a volunteer or two as a result of that visit.

In June we took part in Gateshead's Volunteers Month, taking stalls at events in Saltwell Park, the Teams Festival and Birtley Festival. Gateshead Council kindly gave us a small grant for promotional materials, so for once we have a good stock of folders.

Also in June we were at Broadacre House in Newcastle each Wednesday to talk with other charities and individuals about what we do, and to introduce our proposal for a literacy project we are calling WordPlay. This is specifically aimed at teenagers whose reading and writing skills are not up to scratch. The key word is PLAY.... to get people over their resistance to reading and writing as being some boring thing you have to do at school and communicate the huge fun of words. We have been particularly struck by the high proportion of people in prison who have very low literacy skills. In our work with the Young Offenders Team we also come across a number of young people who really need help with literacy to avoid a future where they end up becoming another part of the prison statistic.

According to a report published in December 2012, the North East and London have the lowest literacy levels of the whole country, so this seems like a good time to try to do something about this. We are delighted to be able to say that we have just received a letter from the Woodward Charitable Trust saying that they have agreed to make a small grant so that we can run a pilot for WordPlay this autumn.

Again in the autumn we are hoping to find a permanent (as much as such projects are ever permanent) space at Broadacre House for a multilingual library. We have already had a considerable number of people offering to volunteer for the library. Since several of these are people for whom English is a second or third language, we hope to be able to run sessions where these people can practice their English in a pratical work situation.

In our last entry we showed a photo of the library we helped WERS to set up - unfortunately this is closing down this month, but the books are being returned to us and will form the basis of the new multilingual library. We hope that people who enjoyed visiting the library when it was in Arthur's Hill will find their way to the City Centre and continue  being able to enjoy books in their own language.

Saturday 10 August we'll be taking part in the Salvation Army's Community Day, and we'll go loaded down with books. This Salvation Army group has brought us so many useful things - display panels, room separation screens, white boards, an overhead projector which we will use in WordPlay, and many other great things - so losing a day in the midst of what was trying to be a summer holiday is not really a disaster!

For the rest.... there are possibilities of new BookSpaces in a number of places - as always we call on people interested in the project to consider opening a branch near where they live.... It's really not complicated....write and ask if you want to know more.

Also, if you're not already on our Facebook page.... look for the Borderline Books group.

Make a Date!

Put it in your diary now..... Sunday 28 April.....

We're holding an open day / fundraiser at Borderline Books from 2 in the afternoon. there will be music and poetry, food and fun, an auction, a raffle and surprises of all sorts.

It will be a great chance for those of you who haven't visited yet to see the amazing range of books we have in a variety of languages. It will also be a chance to network with people from a number of local organisations working to improve the lives of vulnerable people around Newcastle and Gateshead.

It will be family friendly, wheelchair friendly, people friendly ... easy parking, lots of outside to smoke in.

Should we tell you some of the people who are coming to make it great? Poets Pippa Little, Peter Mortimer, Catherine Graham, Aidan Clarke, Sheree Mack, Mandy Maxwell.... writer Shelley Day Sclater - to name but a few.  With music from (at least) Nezzie and Theo

We have a special team doing the catering ... more about that a little later. It will be clean fresh and healthy vegetarian food - no alcohol, no fizzy nonsense.

Entry: £3 / £2 concession   Exit: One book
for the record, we currently receive no funding from anywhere except the small personal donations given by visitors who think Borderline Books is a Great Idea!

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In the meantime an update of what we have been doing for the last year or so.... with photos of the library we helped the West End Refugee Service to set up:

And a book corner at the People's Kitchen

Plans for the future include filling more bookshelvesin local community centres and drop-ins for people without homes. We would also like to supplement the work of the local libraries in retirement homes. there must be so many people who give away their favourite books when they move into care homes and many of them may regret this later. We'd love to attempt to supply books which the library may no longer have in stock and welcome people to contact us if they would like to give us booklists for us to try to track down for you.

We absolutely don't want to take over the great work done by the local libraries with the 'read at home' service, but would like to be able to take over where they leave off.

support your local library while you still have one!!

Come for a visit!

For those of you who will be visiting us for the first time in December - this is what our building looks like. We have half of the ground floor of the East Wing of 5th Avenue Plaza, Queensway North on the Team Valley in Gateshead.
It's right next to the A1, between Retail World and the Premier Inn - Queensway is parallel with Kingsway, so no more excuses that you can't find us! There is plenty of free parking right next to our back door, so it's also very easy to bring things in and out.

The new Gateshead Food Bank used one of our rooms for a few months from the summer onwards. They have just moved to much larger premises, so we are able to use the room they had for all non-book items we have on offer at the moment.

People often give us books and then say 'oh, we have some toys, do you know where we can donate those?' - so we take the toys as well. The women's refuges in particular have children who may have had to leave home without their teddies and toys, and we will always find new homes for them.

Recently we received our first donation from Giving World Online so for a while we can offer baby sleepsuits and rompers and we'll be giving goodie bags for boys and girls for Christmas and New Year.  In the future we hope to be able to work much more with Giving World Online so that the items they offer can be more easily available to charities around the North of England.

We also have large quantities of certain items of stationery, including pens and post-it notes available to local charities and community groups.

Our Dutch office in Leiden also has stationery as well as a huge assortment of books - so things are booming on both sides of the water.

Don't forget to give us a call if you want books in time for Christmas - many of them are brand new or in super-good condition. We have some lovely childrens' books that will make great gifts. We are open regularly on Wednesdays from 11.30 til 4 at least, and on other days by arrangement. You are advised to phone or email us just to check - 07 808 704 307 or books [@] borderlinebooks.org
See you soon!

This was how the car looked after cramming in the second load of books from Greenfield School in Newton Aycliff a couple of weeks ago.

Having packed them very randomly into boxes as they were unloaded in Team Valley, some brave souls came along this week to unpack the whole lot and sort them into those books that may be suitable for a school in Zimbabwe and those which are better for local use. That was a much larger job than the volunteers from New Hope North East had bargained on, but with tea and shortbread, they battled on.  The result is that it is now clear what English grammar books are available and how many copies of each. It seems that anything more than one copy is something of a luxury in many schools.

Last week we had a visit from some members of the drop-in centre in Sunderland who were happy to leave with a collection of books for themselves and friends who were unable to come this time. We are hoping that we may be able to offer space for writing groups or language classes since the building is so well-suited for welcoming groups.

We've also been phoning round to remind local organizations that they should come and browse the shelves which are full to bursting. We particularly like to invite Womens' Aid to bring groups of women who enjoy reading so they can choose books for themselves and their children. It is up to them whether they take the books for keeps or bring them back and take others. There are enough books for everyone. - the only stipulation is that they remain FREE OF CHARGE and are not sold by anyone. They are donated to us to be given away free, and that's the way they should remain.

Don't forget: Cumberland Arms, 27 September, 7.30 for a great night of music, poetry and goldfish.