Service Learning Projects for students

I saw one of our service learning students during HL’s library book sale and again this morning.  She mentioned that she thought that the students had emailed Liz and I several times without success…In talking with Liz last night, neither of us had heard from any of them via email or other ways. So I emailed all the members of the service learning class and Liz.  I also worked on projects that students could do if they don’t have a car to get to Sylva.

Here are some of the options we came up with for student service learning hours.

1.  Volunteer at the Jackson County Library in Sylva, NC to assist Liz in going through new donated materials
2. Volunteer at Friends of the Library Bookstore downtown Sylva, NC to work some hours for credit for the project. 
3. Work on creating a wish list of titles into LIBRARYTHING.com for inmates using the list of subjects below.  http://www.librarything.com/catalog/jailswnc.  You might need to click the down arrow where it says “All collections” to find it once you log into the account.
   • Disabilities
   • Employment
   • Family
   • Mental Health
   • Games
   • General Health and Wellness
   •  General Non Fiction
   • Housing
   • Legal
   • Personal Finance
   • Prisoner’s Writings
   • Reentry
   • Relationships
   • Recovery
   • Small business
   •  Spanish language books
   • Transportation
   • Treatment
   • Dummies book
4. Help us to get started crowdsourcing for this project
   1. If you know anything about Crowdsourcing with sites like Kickstarter.com.  Create some ideas for creating a marketing plan to help us do fundraising for this cause.
      1. Writing a page of ideas about what made you interesting in this project and why others might be interested in donating money the purchase of books for inmates.
      2. Collect some stories of how important reading in jail is for us to use.
      3. What kind of incentives could we give to those that donate?
         1. For example: Some crowd funding sites offer incentives to people who fund projects by way of special rewards, which are usually dependent on what the project starter decides to offer. The most popular type of this reward system is used by the crowdfunding service Kickstarter, wherein their supporters (called “backers”) are given a tiered-reward system, where they can donate as much as they want with higher donations being given better incentives. For instance, a videogame project may give every backer a free mention in the credits, while those who donate $50 or more get a limited copy of the game, while those who donate $100 get a limited copy AND a set of artbooks and figurines and so on.
         2. Come up with ideas such as book plates in the front of the book to tell who donated funds to buy it, or a story of a person that had a friend or relative in jail that successfully got out…something like this…
         3. Other ways of providing incentives?
         1. Look over these crowdsourcing sites and make recommendations of which might be good for this kind of project.  Here is a list of some I’ve collected but I haven’t looked at them carefully.
      1.  Kickstarter.com – is the largest crowd funding site and most established
      2. Indiegogocom – actually older than kickstarter. They support a whole gamut of projects and inventions. They also have a lot of funders in the site
      3.  gofundme.com – it is a new site that also caters to personal project
      4. Startsomegood.com – they look for socially-responsible inventions or projects