Overdue Books Fight Hunger

Share on Facebook

It is important for libraries to keep books on the shelves. And people need to keep their shelves amply stocked with groceries.
With Food for Fines programs, both needs are served.

Several libraries throughout the country participate in Food for Fines programs, which allow library users to pay off their library fines with non-perishable food that is then donated to food banks. Last November, for example, the Gail Borden Public Library District in Elgin, Illinois, waived $1 in overdue fines for every can of food a patron brought in. That food helped fill the shelves of two local food pantries, the Salvation Army and the Community Crisis Center.

"We stagger it throughout the years. Sometimes it's at National Library Week or sometimes it's for the holidays. Sometimes we do it with different organizations. But we usually run it for a week," said Kate Burlette, Gail Borden’s director of library experiences.

By the time the week is over, the library is swamped with cans. One year, the library collected more than 3,000 cans. She said the library has been running the program for five years. "It's a really good way to help our customers clear their accounts and be able check out more items, which is what we're all about. And also they put some food in their pantry, so they help people too," Burlette said.

Last year, the food was badly needed. "We had a lot of people out of work. I think our unemployment was running about 12 percent when we started this. We really wanted to be able to help people and do what we could here," Burlette said.

Fines for returning materials late are nearly universal among public libraries, but Food for Fines programs are similarly widespread. On the East Coast, three public libraries in the Passaic Valley in New Jersey—Little Falls Public Library, Alfred H. Baumann Free Public Library in Woodland Park, and Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Totowa—team up to collect food for CUMAC/ECHO, a local food pantry.

Baumann Director Robert Lindsley said his library runs Food for Fines in February in conjunction with Valentine's Day. "We have found it to be extremely well received by the community. It is a good way to center people's thoughts upon giving and the need that the food pantries have, especially within the last couple of years, with people out of work and families on hard times."

Last year, the three libraries collected more than a ton of food was collected, including canned goods, boxes of cereal and pasta and envelopes of soup.

The libraries also benefit. "Materials are coming back. It's encouraging people to return items," Lindsley said.

The Linebaugh Public Library System, headquartered in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, also conducts a Food for Fines program. Heather Lanier, circulation supervisor at the system’s main branch, said her library typically holds the event in October, because it wants to have the food that gets collected into the food banks before Thanksgiving. Also, the library asks for primarily canned goods. “That’s primarily because boxes of rice, once you stack hundreds of pounds of cans on top of them, don’t really do a whole lot of good in the state that they arrive at the food bank.”

Lanier said the library held its first Food for Fines week in 2008. Her library learned about the program through another library. "We didn't rebuild the wheel. We just borrowed from how they did it," he said.

Lanier said the library tries to be the cornerstone of the community. “It’s just something nice that you can do for your neighbor, and we just sort of are the middlemen to help that happen. We get a lot of positive feedback from the patrons that bring items back and bring in any canned goods. It seems it’s a lot easier to do that, or maybe it just occurs to them that this is the helpful thing to do.”

Resources
Give a Little: How Your Small Donations Can Transform Our World
by Wendy Smith
Smith’s guide looks at dozens of charities and the ways they enrich the lives of people around the world, and shows the good that can be achieved with small donations.

Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty
by Mark Winne
Winne advocates closer relationships between consumers and producers, to counter the rise of corporate agriculture and the processed foods that dominated supermarkets in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
An economist and advisor to the United Nations, Sachs offers a blueprint for eliminating by 2025 the hunger and extreme poverty responsible for millions of deaths around the world.

Photo credit: Canned goods collected at the University of Maryland Baltimore Health Sciences & Human Services library during a 2007 Food for Fines program.