Qalam aur Kitab’s Book drive has been launched!
Qalam aur Kitab? What's that?
Well you know often when we move to the next grade, our old books are than placed in the old store with the hopes that we will need them again in future. But that “again” never comes and those old books stay in the store with new layers of dust appearing on it.
Than there are some who just dispose those old books off for recycling or sell it off to the kabareya for a few rupees.
Those books that are not being used could come in handy for some. Those books that are being disposed off for recycling or given to the kabaryea at a very low price, could be very helpful for someone who cannot afford that book at its actual price.
Point being, knowledge is stored in books and if you are not going to use it, sell that knowledge for a pateesa or dispose it off in the bin, than why not give it to us so that we could deliver to the rightful place.
Infact, we have decided to work with two different kinds of organization to make sure that books do not get wasted by them either.
Read Foundation would be getting curriculum books as they run schools for the underpriveldge all over Pakistan.
Read Pakistan would be getting novels and all other kinds of books as they have a goal to open up more than 1000 libraries all over Pakistan.
We plan to achieve this goal by getting 300 books. This means that each member would be required to get 50 books each. This task would have to be completed by February 19th so that they could be sorted out and donated to the organizations according to their needs
To make the process of spreading info and collecting smooth, we will be counting the number of books we have received each week per group member and than add that to the total tally.
Our Pitch
Guys, we have started a book drive. Any kind of book donation is welcomed. Be it curriculum books or novels
Once collection is done we will be distributing these books to
-Read Foundation
-Read Pakistan
Curriculum books will go to Read Foundation who are involved in the education of underprivileged children in different parts of Pakistan
Novels and any other kind of books that are not related to school curriculum will be donated to Read Pakistan. They are involved in building libraries in Pakistan.
Now for this book drive, we of course had to make an action plan. Thus below is the Business Model Canvas we made:
This project can only bare fruit if we follow a time line, thus the following time line was proposed against each member has to follow:
Task Division:
Umar Jibran
Graphic designing, making the posters for social media and physical places. Gathering everyone’s home address and making a customized poster for each member.
Exploring and researching about crowdfunding websites, whether it would be help for us or not
Incharge for collecting books from Peshawar
Urooj Fatima
Collecting books donation from Kharian. Also involved in collecting books from Islamic University, Islamabad
Sania Ahmad
Incharge of the Social Media Page. Has to make updates each week regarding posters and the donations we received from which area.
Try to negotiate with Café Sol to let us promote ourselves there. If successful good for us. If not, no worries
Post Book donation posters on her social media accounts and her community’s fb page.
Mujahid
Spread news about our book donation use social media aswell. Post the posters in his community
Usama
Spread news about our book donation at his university. Post posters physically and on social media
Also assist Sania with the FB page of our project.
Shah Rukh Khalid
Post posters in DHA 1. Get book donations from Bahria University students.
Also find organizations that will be accepting book donations.
Note: Each group member has been given a goal of collecting 50 books at least. The group target is to get 300 books by February 19th.
All members will have to sort out the books according to the organization and have them delivered
Anticipated Challenges
There are chances that we might not get relevant books, thus having two organizations on board minimizes those problems. If a book is not suitable for the curriculum of one organization, we could give it to the other organization that is involved in making library.
We might find some interesting books that we would want to keep for ourselves. But each member is trusted with the task of not keeping a single book we receive as donation no matter how attractive or good that book is.
One challenge we have already overcome was the organization one. Initially I had contacted 10 organizations through email. TCF was the first organization to respond back, but they tried to propose us a new offer. They wanted us to do crowd funding for them but we as a group were reluctant as our main goal was to do a book drive. Thus, by working with TCF we would had not been able to work on our primary goal. The TCF project is something we could work in future under the umbrella of Qalam aur Kitab.
Eventually, I received an email response from Read Foundation and a Facebook response from Read Pakistan. Both organizations gave us consent to use their name on the posters.
There are some group members not participating, and that is a problem that is being dealt with currently.
