What goes on during a volunteer session?
Here are some volunteers processing book requests in our new space:
A volunteer at work opening letters for upcoming sessions:
Our official request box waiting for volunteers to pick a letter:
Each letter has to be checked in our restrictions binder. We have a section for each state with each city listed as every prison has their own rules about what can be sent:
There is a handy library directory mounted on the wall for volunteers to locate books on a particular subject:
Volunteers browsing for books that will match the book requestor’s stated interests. This is the fun part!
A volunteer with a book selection:
An invoice receipt listing each book title has to be completed and included in each package. Volunteers are encouraged to write a note on the back. It’s sometimes the only contact an incarcerated person has outside the prison so they are much appreciated:
This is a poster on our wall that includes tips about how to fill out the address label and receipt. It’s very important to do it correctly. Points for good handwriting and double checking the prison id!
This is a “half slip” that we send in response to some letters. The dreaded “Do Not Send” is because some prisons won’t accept packages from us for whatever reason and we need to let the book requester know. Sometimes we simply want more info from the writer as to what types of books they’d like to receive.
Our supply station. Lots of envelopes and lots of tape!
It’s postage time! The ideal package will be under 3 lbs though sometimes the perfect book requires some extra weight.
A completed package ready to send!
We do a fair amount of special handling of letters. For example, some Pennsylvania letters have to be sent through a security processing center so we pull those out for volunteers to package up in a specific manner. This is becoming more and more common for different states, alas. Fortunately, we have volunteers willing to handle these controlled cases.
This is our thank you letter rack. It holds letters that have been sent to the attention of a particular volunteer. This is usually because the volunteer wrote a particularly nice note on the back of a receipt and the incarcerated person is responding with appreciation for the personal touch:
Some of our favorite really great thank you notes are posted on a bulletin board for all to see and be inspired by. (There are more online too)
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