Books + Design Thinking = Awesome Summer Book Bus
Third time's the charm, right? I really want to share this incredible story, but it is not that easy because I want  everyone who reads this to understand and get the picture of how wonderful this experience has been for me. It combines what we have been working on for the last couple of months, Design Thinking with community collaboration through partnerships such as an Eagle Project - book donations, Durham Bus services - donating the bus and driver, Keller Public Library, Ace Hardware  and Keller ISD schools - locations, and of course librarians.

What we were able to do was to provide over 6000 books for over 1500 visits from the community for the month of June was not only amazing becasue we actually did something, but the very act of serving the community was a lot of fun.

Every teacher wants their students to read over the summer because they know that if a student reads over the summer they will not suffer from the dreaded summer slide. They also want students to develop a love for reading. However, many times students don’t have the opportunity to visit the library during the summer  for various reasons. So, the librarians used Design Thinking to create a Summer Book Bus. This small fact that we actually followed the Design Thinking also makes the success of this project even better. You can see from our other posts that we have been using it with our students, but now as librarians we used it to solve a much bigger problem. I will have to write another post about the actual method. 

Through Design Thinking, we created a bus that traveled to ten different locations each week and gave books to students, families, and community members.  The best part was that they did not need to return the books. They could keep the books to build their own library.

Most of the locations were elementary schools in our district. We chose schools that had students who might not get to visit libraries over the summer and who might not have books in their homes. We also had four evening events, two at a public library and two at a neighborhood hardware store. All of the books were either donated from an Eagle project or from a grant. The bus and driver were donated by Durham Bus Services. We used the Design Thinking steps to work through the challenges so that we could provide books for students.

Results: Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday mornings, we handed out books to people. Most of the patrons were students, but parents were welcome and there were books for all ages. We loved having families come and pick out books. One best surprises was the fact that some of the schools that we chose had summer school programs so there were a lot of students who were able to access the bus and the books. We did have four evening stops and these were busy with families. ot have many patrons.

As several librarians have said, “this has been a very fulfilling project, but it was also very tiring” because we were so busy.  The bus far exceeded our expectations. We are looking forward to using this year and Design Thinking to help this product evolve and make it bigger and better.