Our featured volunteer this winter is Kim (she/they). Kim has been volunteering with BTP since June. Recently, she saw how many requests...

What got you interested in BTP to begin with, or what made you start volunteering? Does it tie in to the rest of your life in any...

What got you interested in BTP to begin with, or what made you start volunteering? Does it tie in to the rest of your life in any...

I became interested in BTP when I first heard about it, decades ago, when the facilities were located in Pioneer Square and volunteers...

Susan began volunteering with us in April. Board member Andy Chan recalls, “When I first met Susan it was clear she took the work very...

You won’t see Roger and Susan during shifts very often, but they make enormous contributions behind the scenes. When “Books to Prisoners”...

What got you interested in BTP to begin with, or what made you start volunteering? Does it tie in to the rest of your life in any...

Thanks to Kate Reading, Micheal Kramer, and the Wheel of Time fans of the https://www.patreon.com/littleband who recently donated over $1200 to BtP. Kate and Michael, who record the audio versions of the Wheel of Time books written by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, are long-time BtP supporters. Donate at least $50 to BtP (or another group that sends free used books to prisoners), send them the receipt, and they will record a greeting message of up to 100 words for you.

From 2013 to 2018, Books to Prisoners filled orders out of a basement work space we rented from the University Christian Church at NE 50th St and 15th Ave NE. This has been our only venue so far to provide live music to work by. On Tuesday nights, the Seattle Choral Company rehearsed down the hall. Thursday nights, we listened to jazz musicians from the Boeing Employees Concert Band. During that time, we had lots of volunteers from the University of Washington. We also came t

Sol began an internship with Books to Prisoners in January 2023. She has redone much of our signage and our visual guide to where books...

Craig began volunteering at BtP in July 2022. According to Andy, one of our board members, “From the first time I met Craig he had a...

Andy Chan has volunteered with Book to Prisoners since 1994. This is the first in a series of anecdotes from our history to commemorate our 50th Anniversary . Books to Prisoners has had many homes: at least nine that we can remember. For much of our existence, we have lived rent-free. This was as much for necessity as preference. For decades, BTP was run on a shoestring. The core group of BTP volunteers never much loved fundraising – much preferring to focus on the mission o

What got you interested in BTP to begin with, or what made you start volunteering? Does it tie into the rest of your life in any...

“Anjali is the kind of young person we love to see taking an interest in literacy and reading in prison. Her stick-to-it-iveness is truly...

Sydney began volunteering with Books to Prisoners in June. She comes in several times a month to wrap packages of books prisoners have...

Our intentions of getting Volunteer of the Month interviews out on a monthly basis may have stumbled somewhat, but – thankfully – our...

Hey all, it’s been a little bit since we nominated anybody to be Volunteer of the Month! (Almost a year, in fact.) In spite of – or perhaps because of – how stressful external conditions are right now, we’ve decided to get back into the groove and publish a series of VOTM interviews over the next few months. Right now we’re distributed into bubble shifts – specific volunteers are only working with specific staff members, in order to reduce the number of potential COVID-19 vec

Kim is an experienced volunteer who’s done a wonderful job of connecting BTP to outside organizations, especially her workplace (Queen Anne Book Company.) Many of the books we currently hold in stock were donated through a program she started at QABC; to celebrate, we asked her a couple questions about her experiences volunteering with us. 1. How did you get started with Books to Prisoners? How long have you been volunteering? The Washington DOC book ban pissed me off. That’s

Books to Prisoners is pleased to welcome our summer intern, Logan! Logan is a passionate advocate of prison abolition, and is excited about a lot of the community-led work being done in Seattle around restorative justice and opposition to the new youth jail. They became interested in working with Books to Prisoners because of their interest in prison advocacy and literature, and their belief that prison abolition work must be accompanied by support for people who are already

Our May volunteer of the month, Melanie, has been volunteering with Books to Prisoners since September 2017 and has put in a truly impressive number of hours since then – almost as much as our paid program coordinator! We sat down with Melanie to chat about Books to Prisoners and what inspired her to start volunteering. Here’s what she had to say: What attracted you about Books to Prisoners specifically? There was a large list I was looking at, but I was attracted to BTP bec