Invisible Children is the non-profit organization that will benefit from the Building Bridges book drive.
Drop-off sites like this one are located throughout campus.
A book drive organized in association with the annual Building Bridges Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College is underway at the College and in the cities of St. Peter and North Mankato. Books will be collected until mid-January when they will be sold online with proceeds going to the non-profit group Invisible Children and its program Schools for Schools, which is designed to bring aid to students in the African country of Uganda.
The Building Bridges Conference committee has set a donation goal of 30,000 books. Drop-off sites will be located throughout the Gustavus campus including one at the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library.
Invisible Children was founded by three college students in 2003 to focus on the issue of child soldiers. The organization has now expanded to focus on education issues in war-torn Uganda. The Schools for Schools program has helped to rebuild schools ravaged by civil war, given books and supplies to needy students, and awarded secondary school scholarships to over 700 students.
The Building Bridges Conference is a student-led, student-initiated diversity conference dedicated to addressing the pressing social and global issues of today. The conference emphasizes awareness and action by educating attendees about a topic while giving them an opportunity to become directly involved in the issue on the day of the conference.
This year, the 14th annual conference is titled “Liberation Through Education,” and will take place March 14. This year’s keynote speaker will be Erin Gruwell, the teacher portrayed in the movie Freedom Writers and the narrator of the book The Freedom Writers Diary — How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them.
For more information about the Building Bridges Conference or the book drive, contact Building Bridges Co-Chairs Alli Linn and Rita Stevermer at BBCo-Chairs09@gustavus.edu.
The following video is a taped interview with co-chairs Linn and Stevermer:
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Media Contact: Director of Media Relations and Internal Communication Luc Hatlestad
luch@gustavus.edu
507-933-7510