An alternative way to dispose of old textbooks

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: SUPPLIED BY BRADY BURKE
Rather than turn your textbooks into door stoppers and dust collectors, why not donate them to post-secondary students in Africa who are in dire need of them?

When Chris Janssen taught in Rwanda last year, he saw an urgent need for textbooks in post-secondary institutions in Africa.

“I saw a dire need for text books there – dozens of students sharing one photocopied textbook,” the Western University grad said. “At home, we have all these textbooks sitting around, collecting dust that we used for one term.”

So, back in January, he decided to dedicate all his time to a project he started while in school: Textbooks for Change.

Textbooks for Change is an organization that collects used textbooks around colleges and universities in southern Ontario and ships them to post-secondary institutions in 39 African countries. The organization has drop boxes in eight schools.

Once the books are brought to Textbooks for Change’s facility in London, the books are sorted – 50 per cent of the books are sent to post-secondary institutions in Africa, 25 per cent are sold online across North America and the other 25 per cent are recycled.

The money the organization earns from selling books online it splits between running the operations, such as marketing and paying employees it employs through Goodwill; donating money to student clubs and giving micro-loans to entrepreneurs.

“I’m really passionate about entrepreneurship as well, I believe that the power of business can create a lot of social change,” Janssen said.

So far, the organization has donated close $30,000 to student clubs, and it has given over $35,000 micro-loans.

As for textbooks, it has sent 24,000 books to Africa – one crate to a university in Ethiopia and one crate to a university in Ghana. The next crate, schedule to go out at the end of January, will go to Kenya.

The organizations plans to expand throughout Ontario, hoping to collect books from 16 universities by April, Janssen said.

The long-term goal is to donate a million books to Africa within the next five years.

“We hope to help students around the world become more knowledgeable,” said Fanshawe Student Union President Matt Stewart. “We help out a lot of not-for-profit organizations, and we help out a lot of organizations that help students and the educational system around the world, and that’s what this is doing,”

There are three drop boxes in which Fanshawe College students can give their books to Textbooks for Change: one in the library, one in the book store and one by the FSU office. The organization is looking for post-secondary textbooks that have been written in the past 10 years.