Work Involved

Do you want to directly touch the lives of prisoners around the country? We rely solely on volunteers to process requests and do other work required to keep the program running.

Responding to prisoner requests for books – “Picking” and “Packing” - accounts for approximately 90% of the work we do during our volunteer sessions.  You must be able to do one of these jobs to volunteer. 

Pickers read a prisoner’s hand-written request and find appropriate books in our book store.  Pickers are essentially personal shoppers for the prisoners.  If you enjoy browsing in your local library or bookstore, this is the job for you!  High school-level reading skills and a love of books are all you need to do this job. 

Packers prepare the books for mailing.  They read the prisoner’s request and make sure that the books chosen by the pickers are appropriate and do not contain any forbidden items.  Packers then wrap the books in brown paper - just like wrapping a birthday present - and prepare an invoice.  People who can read at least at the high school-level, have legible handwriting and good attention to detail are great candidates for this job. 

Occasionally we also ask volunteers to help with other tasks such as processing book donations and incoming mail. 

If you would like to help, just come by our office and we'll get you started. Click here for our volunteer hours. There's no need to sign up ahead of time and you can stay for as long as you wish. For your first visit please arrive at 6:30 pm. Please email or call us if you have any questions.