Criteria for Granting Private Group Sessions
(June 2025)
Urbana Champaign Books to Prisoners is a volunteer group with only one part-time staff. Books to Prisoners has a budget to hold four weekly public volunteer sessions where most of the work is done, and supervision is provided.
This means that Books to Prisoners doesn’t have the same need for untrained volunteer groups in the same way other non-profits might. All our sessions require a 2 hour training first.
Even so, we do offer to host private group sessions. It is part of our mission: to raise community awareness and engagement with the needs of incarcerated people and bringing in groups can be a way to do that. Our sessions are 2 hours and we have room for 12 people at most. Arranging for additional sessions that are private, however, requires extra work on our part, especially if the group is more desirous of a fun group time together rather than serving our mission.
The following policy attempts to balance two goals:
1) raise awareness in our community of the needs of incarcerated people for books,
and
2) maintain our labor budget and our balanced workflow (managed by 4 weekly sessions).
Therefore, to be granted a 2-hour private session, your group must make a commitment to support B2P in one of the following ways:
- Provide at least 12 of your members as volunteers at either our spring or our fall book sale because this is when we really need volunteers, as opposed to private sessions. These sales require over seventy volunteers without whom we could not hold these fundraisers, so knowing we’d have the participation of members of your group would help a lot. They don’t have to be the same individuals who attend the group session.
- Donating 6-8 books (paperback, in very good to “like new” condition) in our high-demand topics./titles* We are facing increasing restrictions by IDOC on book conditions. Providing us with even 8 more of highly requested but seldom donated books would be very valuable to us.
- Contributing to offsetting the wages for staffing the extra session--$50.00
If your group is interested in arranging for a private group session you must agree to one of the above options. Contact the Program Coordinator to work that out (contact@books2 prisoners.org). If your group is unable to make a commitment to support B2P in the ways suggested, encourage your members to sign up as individuals on our regular volunteer chart, beginning with training sessions if they are new to B2P.
*Topics
- Learn-to-draw book for adults
- Beginner books on learning Arabic or Hebrew
- Recent edition of Dungeons and Dragons books (these may not come in paperback, so hardcovers are ok for this topic)
Titles
- Prisoners' Self-Help Litigation Manual
- Think Outside the Cell: An Entrepreneur's Guide for the Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated (J. Robinson)
- 2024 or 2025 World Almanac & Book of Facts
- Ingles para Dummies --or other beginning level, English learning book for Spanish speakers
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