David Baldacci did more than just sign books and tell jokes on his tour for The Collectors this fall. He also promoted the big white box—or, more precisely, the bestselling author talked up a series of big white boxes, each of which can hold 72 pounds of books. There was one at every bookstore where Baldacci read on his tour, and at every stop he asked readers to fill them with books. The boxes are a key component in an innovative book donation program called Feeding Body and Mind, which collects new and used books and donates them to food banks for distribution.
Baldacci conceived the program in September, when he and his employees at the Wish You Well Foundation noticed that many of the grant proposals they received included requests for money to buy food. Baldacci's foundation, launched in 1999, funds literacy projects, so the requests for food money struck them as odd, until they realized that many of the illiterate are hungry.
"It dawned on me at that point that we were really looking at the same audience," Baldacci said. "People who are impoverished are also often illiterate." So his foundation contacted America's Second Harvest, a national network of food banks. Within a month, the two organizations had worked out a program with Baldacci's publisher, Hachette. Under the program, Baldacci promotes Feeding Body and Mind at his readings and bookstores put the white boxes on display and tape them up when they are full. Hachette pays for the boxes to be shipped to local Second Harvest food banks, and the food banks distribute the books through their programs, handing out books at soup kitchens and churches, for example, and through their Backpacks Program, which sends children home with food for the weekend.
In all, Feed Body and Mind collected 5,808 pounds of books. Hachette also donated 500 children's and young adult books to the nine participating food banks, and spent "hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising, shipping and supplies," said Hachette senior v-p Jamie Raab. Hachette took a full-page ad in USA Today promoting Feed Body and Mind and 11 ads in newspapers in tour cities touting both Baldacci's appearance and the donation program.
"What we would like to do is make this an industry charity," said Deborah Hocutt of Wish You Well. Raab would also like to see Feed Body and Mind grow. "It's something that I think all of us in publishing need to do on a bigger scale." On December 12, Raab and Baldacci will meet with Ross Fraser of Second Harvest to discuss how to expand the program to include more authors and more publishers in 2007.
Until then, Hocutt will keeping mailing out the big white boxes to any booksellers who want to support the charity in their store.
