Where Can I Donate Children's Books in Tampa?

Give My Books Network takes them straight from the house, free, anywhere a Local Pick-Up Partner covers your Tampa ZIP code. Pick a service day, box the books, leave the cartons out before 8 AM.

Board books are the first thing out of any load and the first thing requested back. Chewed corner, bent flap, a fossilized thumbprint of applesauce on a bear's nose, and they are still the most wanted item in the whole network.

Why Does This Shelf Never Stop Moving?

Children outgrow books far faster than books wear out. A picture book survives four hundred readings by one kid and is still perfectly good for the next one, while a family in the University Area burns through an entire reading level in about eight months.

Somebody is always aging out. Somebody else is always aging in. That mismatch is the whole engine, and it is why a children's shelf empties every couple of years whether anyone plans for it or not.

Are Spanish-Language Children's Books Needed in Tampa?

Badly, and the need grows every year. Early readers and picture books in Spanish are among the titles Title I classrooms in East Tampa and around the University Area ask Give My Books Network for and rarely have enough of.

Hillsborough County Public Schools teachers stretch a classroom-library budget about as far as arithmetic allows. A carton of gently read Spanish and dual-language picture books does more good than the person taping it shut usually understands. If a shelf in your house holds both languages, do not split them up. Same carton, every time.

What Gets Taken, Scribbles and All

Nearly everything, including what a library branch has no shelf for. Ordinary wear is expected and it has never once disqualified a book.

• Board books, teeth marks and soft corners included
• Picture books and read-alouds
• Early readers and leveled readers
• Chapter books and middle-grade series, complete or partial
• Young adult novels
• Spanish-language and dual-language titles
• Activity and sticker books with pages left in them
• Read-along CDs and children's audiobooks on disc

Crayon in the margins is fine. A missing dust jacket is fine. A name written in a five-year-old's handwriting inside the cover is arguably an improvement. The one to hold back is the book that got soaked and dried into a wave, which after a wet season in a Tampa garage is worth two minutes of looking for.

How Do I Pack a Carton of Board Books?

Go smaller than instinct says. Board books are dense, a large carton of them becomes unliftable long before it looks full, and a carton that fails at the seam on a damp driveway takes the books with it.

• Small or medium cartons only. Stop while a hand fits comfortably under each side.
• Bag the books, then box them. Carports hold Tampa humidity, and humidity always finds paper.
• Keep the carton up off the bare slab.
• Out on the morning of your service day, never the night before. The 3 PM storm from June to September is the most reliable thing on the calendar.
• Under a roof: carport, screened lanai, deep eave.

Let the kid put one book in the carton themselves. It changes the whole feel of the afternoon, and it costs nothing.

Where Tampa Children's Books Land

A Local Pick-Up Partner sorts every load by hand, offsite, then passes a good share forward to readers, classrooms, libraries, nonprofits, and the organizations requesting titles through the Give ME Books program. Children's books are what those organizations ask for most and receive least.

Another share is resold by the partner, and that resale is the entire reason a household is never billed. Books past reading may eventually be recycled as a last resort. Nobody will promise that a particular book reaches a particular classroom, because no honest person could. What is true is that the requesting queue is real and it is busy. The American Library Association's guide to book donation programs explains well how children's titles actually circulate once they leave a house.

How Do I Book It?

Give Give My Books Network your ZIP code and choose a service day. Where a Local Pick-Up Partner already runs, the booking is instant. Where none does yet, the request enters the out-of-area pickup system for a partner working nearby to claim.

Collections run 8 AM to 8 PM and nobody has to be home. Box the board books, leave them under the carport in the morning, and let some other four-year-old wear them out all over again.