A book drive that grew into a movement
It started with one classroom and a few cardboard boxes. Ten years later, those boxes have become half a million books a year.
It is hard to point to the exact moment Kindfuly began. There was no boardroom, no launch event — just a teacher who kept noticing the same empty backpacks, and a children’s book author who kept hearing the same question at school visits: “Can I keep this one?”
In the fall of 2014, the two of them set a few cardboard boxes by a classroom door in Austin, Texas, and asked families to bring whatever books they’d outgrown. Within a week the boxes were overflowing. Within a month, kids were trading titles in the hallway like baseball cards.
From boxes to a club
The book drive could have ended there. Instead, it turned into a Saturday reading club — a handful of volunteers, a rug, and twenty minutes of reading aloud. Teachers at two nearby schools asked for their own. By the next year, the club had become a structured after-school program in three buildings, and Kindfuly had incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
We never set out to build an organization. We set out to make sure one class had enough books.— A Kindfuly co-founder
Ten years on, the numbers are bigger than anyone in that first classroom imagined: more than500,000 books a year, programs in 28 states, and 4,000 volunteers. But the unit of change hasn’t budged. It is still one kid, one book, and one patient adult who decided to show up.
That’s the part we’d ask you to remember. The movement is large now — but it is still made of the smallest possible thing. You can be someone’s smallest thing.
