Magazine Literacy Bee

Once you have permission to run your KinderHarvest magazine recycling effort, and group of friends or colleagues to help you, there are five easy steps. We want you to write about your KinderHarvest drive in this blog so you can inform and inspire others, so be sure to let us know if you want to do that:

1. FIND LITERACY NEEDS
Reach out to places that will take the magazines (e.g. food pantries; homeless shelters; domestic violence shelters; early learning or after-school programs; job training programs; senior centers, etc.). You can tell them that we have wonderful programs just like this taking magazines in places like San Francisco, Trenton NJ, and Boston. You can read about those efforts in this blog. Let us know the name and address of the agencies that will be taking magazines.

2. SET UP A COLLECTION BIN
Either create a collection bin of your choosing or raise funds (about $35 to purchase, plus about $15 to ship one of our wooden harvest bins. Decorate the bin so that it's attractive, informative, and fun. Send us photos of your bin or post them in your blog here.

3. COLLECT THE MAGAZINES
Publicize the collection and bin locations to your colleagues. Encourage the donation of recent, gently used magazines. It's best if donors don't tear off their mailing label. If it's a paper label, it should be gently removed. If it's printed on the magazine, then they should cross out their name and address. A new gift label will be put on top of the old label, so it will be covered up.

4. SORT AND LABEL THE MAGAZINES
Sort the magazines by category and put a MagazineLiteracy.org gift label on each one. There is a template on our website for printing them. Send us a count of the number of magazines collected by category. Be in touch for our list of categories.

5. DELIVER THE MAGAZINES
Some locations will take any type of magazine. Others will prefer certain categories. Send us a count of the number of magazines delivered to each location by category.