When the African Library Project Board voted earlier this year to hold a golf tournament, Sharna Fey, a Board member since 2011, enthusiastically agreed to become the Project Manager for Links for Literacy.  Originally scheduled for late September, the tournament has been moved to spring 2018.

“A golf tournament brings together two things I love–golf and the African Library Project,” says Sharna. “This project integrates my life.”

Sharna has traveled to Swaziland, Ghana, and Malawi, and she knows that “What we do works. Literacy can lead to social change.  What we do matter.”

But why should ALP do a golf tournament?  Isn’t its mission creating libraries in rural Africa?

While volunteers in the U.S. and Canada collect gently used children’s books and raise the funds to mail them to New Orleans and ship them to Africa, ALP has other operational expenses—training manuals for librarians, HIV/AIDS readers for the libraries, travel expenses for our African partners and librarians to attend our bi-annual summit.  In addition, ALP hired its first staff person, Isabelle Mussard, in 2016 to lead ALP’s continued growth.  These expenses mean that the Board needs to develop additional fund-raising strategies to ensure ALP’s health and sustainability.

But the tournament is not just about fundraising; it is also about friend-raising.  As Sharna says, “We want more people exposed to our mission and the work we do.  We want to broaden our reach and extend our network.”

The ALP Board decided to postpone the tournament until spring in order to ensure that it is an extraordinary event for golfers, volunteers, and sponsors. Stay tuned for updated information.

A successful golf tournament will help ALP change lives in rural Africa, book by book.

Start Your Own Book Drive

Read our Book Drive Guidelines to learn all you need to know to collect, sort, pack and then mail your books to our warehouse, where they will be containerized for shipment to Africa. Your goal is to collect 1,000 appropriate books and approximately $500 for shipping and related costs. Double this and you can start two! Triple it and… you get the idea. To get ideas from other book drives — how they’ve collected their books and raised their funds.

We ship books all year round.  Our typical calendar is:

  • Ghana in February
  • Botswana in March
  • Malawi in June
  • Kenya in July
  • Uganda in August
  • Lesotho in September
  • Sierra Leone in October
  • eSwatini (Swaziland) in November