The success of the greater Philadelphia area-based nonprofit BookSmiles is no secret.
In 2023, Philadelphia Jewish Exponent reported that BookSmiles gave away 55,000 to 60,000 books per month. Today, that number has grown to 150,000 gently used children’s books per month.
“The growth has been strong and deliberate,” Larry Abrams, the founder of BookSmiles, said.
Abrams explained that he runs the nonprofit as if it was a business, with a strategic plan. “I always tell people we are a business that happens to be a nonprofit.”
It’s an approach that has been successful for Abrams since the organization’s inception in 2017. In fact, it has been so successful that it is moving to a new space that is 3 1/2 times the size of where it is now.
“In September of ’22, we moved to our current location, 4,300 square feet in Pennsauken,” Abrams explained. “When we moved to this location, it was just one full-time worker, and that was it. We had just hired somebody but really I came with no staff, and over the last four years we’ve grown to a team of eight full-time workers and three part-timers, and we are now preparing to move into a 14,000-square-foot location in Cherry Hill.”
Abrams said the organization just outgrew the facility. “We have completely run out of space,” he said. “We have so many books coming in, so many going out. We’re restricted only by our space.”
In the new facility, Abrams said that, instead of having only up to 12 volunteers at a time, it will have enough space for up to 75.
“We found our dream space in Cherry Hill,” he added. “This will enable us to expand from moving about 1 1/2 million children’s books per year into moving 4 to 5 million children’s books per year, and that actually is enough to give every child in Philadelphia a full and complete library of their own.”
But BookSmiles doesn’t just give away books to children, it also gives many of its books to teachers who want to start classroom libraries or gives books to the students it knows might lack them.
Not only is the space bigger to accommodate more books and more volunteers, but Abrams said it will also serve as a community hub.
For him, BookSmiles isn’t just a book bank. “It’s kind of like a synagogue, but we’re just completely devoted to social action, to tikkun olum and making the world a better place.
“We’re going to turn it into, really, a community center, a place where book lovers and kids who love our mission are able to gather, meet one another, volunteer, laugh, have fun, meet new friends,” he said. “We have a huge training room where we’ll be able to fit 50 people at once. We’ll be able to handle up to 75 volunteers, but we also imagine a venue where there will be cultural events, there will be poetry readings, there will be mixers and networking events for our BookSmiles Young Professionals board. We’re looking at building that out, getting people from the age of 25 to about 40 to meet up at the book bank to help devise ways to get books into the hands of kids who need them, but also to network and meet people, because I think that is really important.”
Abrams said he expects the new facility to be up and running by September and hopes to eventually open a second location in North Jersey.
“The other thing is, we are becoming a national model for what a book bank can be. And one day, book banks will be as large and ubiquitous as food banks are today.”