Get Involved
There are many ways to get involved with The Storybook Project, and we welcome any support you can provide. This year, we expect our program expenditures to more than double from about $5,000 last year, based on the new facilities where we now operate and growing demand from readers in the Newport prison.
Each book and CD cost $10 in direct costs to send to a child. Postage runs $3.25-$3.50 on average, and we do our best to keep our costs down through bulk purchases and soliciting donations of new and giftable condition books. The Storybook Project has no paid employees or overheads such as office space. To better help us track our impact, we need a volunteer to build and maintain a database. We also welcome grant writers and others who could introduce us to potential sources of funding.
We record readers in the Newport and Wrightsville prisons and Pulaski County Jail four times per year. We record men and women separately at each facility, so we make a total of 24 visits to the prisons and jail in a year. Volunteers can expect to spend a whole morning rcording readers, although a recent surge in demand from moms in the Newport prison means that this session may run into the early afternoon. We welcome you whenever you have time to join us.
After we have recorded men and women in a particular facility, a volunteer burns those recordings to CDs and labels them. Volunteers in Cherokee Village will gather to prepare the books and CDs from the Newport prison for mailing, and Little Rock-based volunteers will do the same for books and CDs from the Wrightsville prison and Pulaski County Jail. This process usually takes about two hours, depending on how many volunteers are available.